Back in the 70's, when our girls were preschoolers (the time has just flown) the education policy was to wait till children got to school before teaching them some basic skills to prepare them for school. We were told the school teachers would fulfill all their needs.
They were wrong! We did this and unfortunately our eldest daughter suffered from this decision. With large class sizes the teachers only had a limited time to help those children who could not grasp the fundamentals. For years we felt so guilty, if only we had known some of the basics to teach her before she started then we are positive her school years wouldn't have been such a struggle.
9 years ago I started working as the practice manager for a group of Pediatric Occupational Therapists (Occupational Therapy Helping Children) who were seeing children with many of the problems our daughter had encountered. Every week I found myself answering questions from concerned parents about the very same or similar struggles - difficulties with fine motor, gross motor and visual perception skills. After chatting with many parents, teachers, special needs teachers, school psychologists, etc, I realized that times haven't changed!
While carefully observing what was done with the children I knew that I could have done most of the tasks myself at home with our own children and, of course, this would apply to so many other parents. If only there was a program available to parents to show them how to teach their own children the basics before they started school, their children would have learnt excellent foundation skills that could then be built on by their teachers. The next step was obvious, develop a program that:
- would teach children some fundamentals before they began school
- is easy for busy parents to follow - we know how hard it is to find the time
- can be used by preschoolers up to children in their first year at school - ages 3-6 (although we are using some of the tasks with our 2 year old granddaughter who is thriving on them!)
- and would
be fun for the both parent and child.
In my work I am very fortunate to have access to many professionals - Pediatric Occupational Therapists, School Teachers, Preschool Teachers and Special Needs Teachers from the USA, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. (I'm also very lucky to have half my siblings and their children - my stepfather is American - living in California, Washington, New York and British Columbia.)
We asked
these wonderful professionals to help us design what we had in mind, from
our perspective as parents (using the KISS principle) and theirs as clinicians
or teachers, then combined our skills to develop a fun packed program
for parent assisted learning.
We hope you enjoy helping your child Get Ready For School as much as we are helping our granddaughters, the scrumptious Alianna and the magical Miss Scarlett, and other children do the same!
Deb and John Dibley
