School readiness is a challenging area in education, particularly for less advantaged children who have not had the opportunity to attend preschool. This podcast episode is all about one teacher’s experience of running an 8-week music program specifically to help kids get ready for Kinder.

You can listen to it above, listen to it on iTunes or read the transcript below. And don’t forget to scroll down to download the free pdf Allison created for us for when we want to try and introduce our own music classes for school readiness!



Introduction

Welcome, it’s great to have you here. I’m Liz and I’m the host of The Early Childhood Research Podcast. This is episode 4 and today I’m speaking to teacher and researcher, Allison Cameron, about using music to help prepare children for school. Allison has been teaching music for many years but she also specialised in learning difficulties through her Masters degree and she’s currently working on her PhD at the Early Start Research Institute based at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

During the last school term of 2014 Allison was asked to run a school readiness program by a Community Centre that was preparing their children for Kindergarten, and these children had never attended preschool so there was some concern about how well they would be able to adapt and be ready for making friends and learning.

School Readiness Through Music

Allison Cameron, welcome to The Early Childhood Research Podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

It’s no problem, it’s my pleasure!

This programme was all about school readiness and I know you wanted to put an emphasis on social skills. What social skills did you choose to emphasize?

What social and executive function skills are important for school readiness?

Patience and Taking Turns

Being able to wait for your turn to speak is really important in the classroom, but it’s also important in order to become a good friend, that you can listen to your friend and not talk over the top of them all the time, which is really important in the playground as well as in the classroom.

But the other sorts of things that I would be looking at would be not just taking turns with speaking but taking turns with the equipment. Obviously when I started the classes I made sure that every child got a turn, but gradually I lessened that because being able to cope with the disappointment of not always getting a turn is really important. But it was those sorts of things that I was thinking about.

Delayed Gratification

It’s also an important part of delaying gratification. For example, in the classroom you don’t get to tell your news every day but you know that on Thursdays it’s going to be your day.

These are really important skills for children because it actually helps them in their learning and helps them to be a really valued member of the class.

Self-regulation

The other things that overlap with social skills are executive function skills, which are things like self-regulation, being able to plan and understand the concept of planning from the teacher’s instructions.

Inhibition control. So knowing when to stop, when to start and working memory skills. I was thinking about being able to follow through with a series of instructions. To listen to those instructions, take them on board and then act on them, because often those children who are able to master those skills very quickly learn more because they actually spend more time on tasks in the classroom.

Children who struggle with those things often spend a lot of time going back to the teacher saying, “what are we meant to be doing?” And then they’ll get lost on the way to the book...