What it means to be "ready"

Nervous and excited 5-year-olds – wearing backpacks that cover half their bodies – walk into a whole new world on their first day of kindergarten. They are full of curiosity, apprehension, and potential. Whether they ultimately realize that potential is heavily influenced by what’s already happened in their lives, long before the start of school.

While most of us will never meet any of those kindergarteners, we have played a role in how ready they are to be successful. When we, as a community, choose to invest in our youngest children, we are increasing the likelihood they will be healthy and ready to learn on day one, and that increases the likelihood of success throughout school.

Readiness for kindergarten is a multifaceted concept that encompasses various domains of child development: physical, sensory motor, social and emotional, language, and cognitive development. These domains ensure children are prepared in every way for the structured environment of a classroom.

Readiness for kindergarten can’t be assessed by a single test or any one measure, but we do know what contributes to a “ready child.”

• Being born healthy, with continued preventive care for physical and behavioral health
• Being developmentally on track, with early identification of delays and disabilities and early treatment, if needed
• Being ready to learn, with early education experiences – at home and/or in another setting – that nurture all facets of development Ready by Five and other early childhood investments direct funding to programs that impact health, development, and readiness to learn. Program-level data and evaluations prove those investments are effective.

Additionally, school districts in Kent County conduct a variety of assessments, most of which have a significant focus on early literacy, to understand the academic skills of their new kindergarteners. The schools share their data with Ready by Five evaluators as one tool to measure the impact of the millage. While the assessments do not reveal an overall difference between kindergarteners who have participated in Ready by Five-funded programs and those who have not, there is a measurable difference among sub-groups. For instance, English Language Learners—children whose first language is something other than English—are more likely to be ready if they engaged in millage-funded programs.

While early literacy is an important determiner of a child’s readiness, it is far from the only one. Research shows soft skills – the ability to self-regulate, follow multi-step directions, work well with others, ask questions – may be most critical to students’ long-term success.

First Steps Kent, evaluators of the Ready by Five Early Childhood Millage, and other stakeholders continue to look for comprehensive measures to assess all facets of kindergarten readiness and how millage-funded programs help set up young children for success.