Forget the ABCs. This Is What Preschool Teachers Want Your Kids to Learn

Rebecca Gale wrote for Working Mother about defining "kindergarten-ready" and the quality standards that make such determinations tricky:

Deciding where to place a child in care is a major decision for any family, and different centers and home-based care locations will often tout their ability to prepare a child for kindergarten. But what does it really mean to be kindergarten-ready?

The answers, according to experts, might not be what you’d expect. The best thing a child can learn at a young age isn’t the ABCs or counting to 20, or any of those other early benchmarks in memorization so long associated with young learning. The most important indicators of early learning come not through book learning, but through strong relationships with their caregivers, where they build up the social-emotional learning skills, which allow children to thrive in a classroom setting.