Real world things your child should know before starting school I: position words (prepositions), places, home address, and directions

Recently, we’ve seen a worrying increase in the number of preschoolers – with and without language issues – who don’t know where they live or how to describe where things are in space.

While lots of early education products and services cater for things like learning numbers, colours and shapes, we think that knowing how to describe where you live and where things are is more important – especially for safety reasons.

Knowing some “spatial” concepts – like “on”, “in”, “under” and “between” – is also helpful background information for later school learning about places and positions, geography and geometry, as well as important life-skills like how to read a map.

For time-poor parents, speech pathologists, early learning educators and teachers, we’ve written this pack to help you assess whether your preschooler has the basic skills to orientate themselves to space: to know where they are and how to explain it to someone else. If not, this pack contains some activities to help preschoolers learn these key things; ideally information all preschoolers should know before starting big school.

We hope you find it useful. It’s available here, on our sister site, Speechies in Business.

Image: https://tinyurl.com/ydy4vuqa

Banter Speech & Language

Banter Speech & Language is an independent firm of speech pathologists for adults and children. We help clients in our local area, including Concord, Concord West, North Strathfield, Rhodes, Strathfield and all other suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West.

Banter Speech & Language is owned and managed by David Kinnane, a Hanen- and LSVT LOUD-certified speech-language pathologist with post-graduate training in the PreLit early literacy preparation program by MultiLit, the Spalding Method for literacy, the Lidcombe and Camperdown Programs for stuttering, and Voicecraft for voice disorders. David is also a Certified PESL Instructor for accent modification.

David holds a Master of Speech Language Pathology from the University of Sydney, where he was a Dean’s Scholar. David is a Practising Member of Speech Pathology Australia and a Certified Practising Speech Pathologist (CPSP).