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.

Image: https://tinyurl.com/ydy4vuqa

Man wearing glasses and a suit, standing in front of a bay

Hi there, I’m David Kinnane.

Principal Speech Pathologist, Banter Speech & Language

Our talented team of certified practising speech pathologists provide unhurried, personalised and evidence-based speech pathology care to children and adults in the Inner West of Sydney and beyond, both in our clinic and via telehealth.

David Kinnane
Speech-Language Pathologist. Lawyer. Father. Reader. Writer. Speaker.

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