One of the many advantages of living in Florida is the access your 4-year-old has to the Voluntary Prekindergarten (VPK) program. This program is free to all families and allows any child the opportunity to gain a headstart in coping with school life. At Providence Children’s Academy, we provide high-quality VPK to start your child’s learning journey the right way, allowing them to develop the necessary social, literacy, cognitive, and physical skills that will stimulate their ability to learn from an early age.
If you are questioning why your child would need to enroll in VPK, and think that they should be left to learn in preschool, we have listed a few reasons why VPK is a helpful step in your little one’s learning journey.
Increased Literacy Skills From an Early Age
Beginning at a young age, children are like sponges, capable of absorbing incredible amounts of information. VPK programs take advantage of this by offering age-appropriate reading to children, exposing them to literature early and fostering a love for reading by exploring new worlds through books.
Taking time to listen to stories will help your child with word recognition, enunciation, pronunciation, and vocabulary. These are beneficial skills to learn early which will help your child to be able to communicate more effectively and have more words available to express themselves. Dual-language learners will especially benefit by increasing their exposure to language and helping them strengthen their brain function.
The step towards being more literate ultimately helps your child when they enter kindergarten, where they can immediately be more receptive to reading exercises and word association after the familiarity that VPK programs offer them.
When your child has a better grip on language, their interaction with others improves. VPK allows children to be in an environment with other children so that they may play and begin to form ideas of role-taking, rule-making, and negotiation. They will start to learn appropriate contact with other children who are different from them and will develop manners in different scenarios such as mealtime, play, or greeting in the morning and afternoon.
Because VPK aims to help children socialize better, they will enter kindergarten with an increased sense of how to socialize, which could potentially help them to make friends and communicate their emotions more easily.
Increased Cognitive Development
VPK programs contain age-appropriate tasks that will develop cognitive function. Children will engage in tasks like recognizing color, shape, and similarity, as well as basic counting. These tasks will develop your child’s ability to classify, compare, contrast, and sequence, which will all help them to start making sense of the world around them to be able to understand concepts such as changing seasons and time.
VPK also helps children gain general knowledge about themselves and their family, as well as increasing their attention spans and organizational skills. The benefit of this is that your little one will be able to start understanding the world around them and can start problem-solving and processing information early on.
Exposure to VPK is also highly beneficial because it will help you to detect any learning difficulty your child may have at an early stage. By being exposed to learning you will be able to understand how they think and learn, and can then prepare them for a kindergarten suited to their specific needs.
Physical Fitness and Refined Motor Ability
A VPK will have your child moving around and playing in ways that will help them improve their motor coordination and fine motor skills. They will learn to jump, hop, throw, and catch in games that are aimed at improving their physical skills in ways that they can easily handle.
Activity from an early age is important for helping your child to find joy in movement and gaining physical strength and will help them be more ready to enter kindergarten and any new physical demands that it brings.
VPK is aimed at creating a strong foundation for your child to enter the schooling system and be able to cope with the transition into a learning environment. VPK is better than attending daycare because your child will be learning skills that make them more receptive to learning, which is proven to increase the school readiness of children by 80%. With their small class sizes and high teacher to child ratio, your child will have full support in gaining a head start to the beginning of their learning career. Visit our website to learn more about enrolling for VPK in Broward County, today!