School Journal | Log 1 | Before School

Most of what I intend to cover in this project is learning from a 1st grade level and above. My reasoning here is completely driven by constraints in my capabilities. If there are books involved or some sort of formal checklist of things to learn, I have a rough idea of how to go about it. But before children enter school, I’m not sure how well defined this learning checklist is. And so, I’m not sure how much justice I can do to this stage of learning.

Furthermore, the learning which happens in the first 5 or 6 years of life must be happening at an incredible pace. The concepts and skills which are learnt are so fundamental, that I’m not sure that I can imagine not knowing them and try to re-learn them either.

Now that I have adequately excused my shortcomings, let’s get into the learning.

Prior to School Learning Checklist

As a starting point, I am hoping that some expert in the space has prepared a checklist of what children learn before the age of 6. So, I have started off by asking Google “what do children learn before the age of 6”.

The AI generated answer, scraping from a few websites seems to cover some key skills. But it definitely seems incomplete to me. For one thing, there is no mention of motor skills. I assume that development of basic motor skills, especially walking, holding and moving objects is a pretty key part of development in this phase.

I went ahead and opened the top 3 results from the Google search to learn more.

• This quora answer by EIH digital agency does a wonderful job of creating a thematic checklist of skills and concepts that children pick up before attending school
• This article from scholastic.com seems to talk about the same set of learning themes and further lists useful tools and books which could help children pick up the relevant skills
• This webmd article also seems to talk about the same set of learning themes with a slight variation in some specifics

Given the strong overlap in learning themes and even some key milestones, I think I can put together a sort of “before school” learning checklist. It is of course important to emphasise that all of search results call out that there is no one size fits all checklist here. All children learn at their own pace and their own way, especially during this phase.

My Before School Learning Checklist

I must reiterate that if you’re a parent looking to check how your child is doing in terms of their learning goals, please do not use my article. This checklist really is just for me to try to repeat the entire learning process as thoroughly as possible. I simply cannot guarantee that this checklist is age appropriate, comprehensive or even sufficiently relevant. With that warning out of the way, let’s continue with my checklist.

1. Motor skills: Overall body movement including balance, walking, running, jumping and climbing. Finer motor skills including moving and using objects like pencils and crayons to draw and colour. These together would include activities like jumping rope, throwing and catching, tying shoe laces etc.
2. Language skills: Vocabulary skills, with around ~20,000 words which are understood and ~2,500 words which are spoken. Ability to construct sentences of 5 to 7 words. Ability to read simple books (unclear on what type or level of books).
3. Cognitive skills: Curiosity about the world, with an ability to apply some form of logic to solve simple problems (unclear on what nature and level of problems). Concept of basic numbers, counting and simple addition and subtraction.
4. Creativity & imagination: Application of creativity and imagination while playing, drawing and creating anything.
5. Social & emotional skills: Practice of inculcated manners, sharing and other social norms which have been taught by family. Reflection of some family traditions, beliefs or values which have been observed.
6. Basic worldly concepts: Concepts of select shapes, colours, spatial awareness, temperature, texture, taste, smell, sound, time and ordering.
7. Independence, self care and safety: Inculcated routines including dressing, brushing teeth, eating and other self-care tasks.

Now that I have a skills and concepts checklist together, ideally I would want to go through the actions of relearning these skills and concepts. Of course most of these are incredibly difficult to learn as if I was learning them for the first time. So, as a next step I shall try to find exercises to emulate relearning some of these concepts. And for others I will probably have to simply accept that I have already learnt them, and try to educate myself on how babies and young children actually do learn these things.