Kindergarten teacher warns: “Almost every parent practices the wrong thing the year before kindergarten — and then wonders in the fall why their child is standing alone at recess.”
More than 20 years of kindergarten, hundreds of first days: what she notices in the very first week — and what parents can still change in the year before.
Two years ago, at 7:50 in the morning, I was standing on the blacktop outside the kindergarten door. My son wasn’t crying, but he was hanging on to my sleeve, and he asked quietly: “Do you really have to go already?”
I smiled, waved, turned around — and cried in the car for ten minutes.
I’d been looking forward to that day for so long. The new backpack was packed, the first-day photo with the little chalkboard sign was taken on the front steps. Everything seemed perfect. But deep in my stomach sat this uneasy feeling I’d been pushing aside for weeks.
Now I know that feeling was right. I just didn’t know what to do with it.
In the weeks that followed, it didn’t get better. It just changed. Ben started complaining of stomachaches in the morning. At pickup, he’d be standing off to the side while the other kids were still playing together. Six weeks in, at a parent-teacher conference, his teacher said something I still haven’t forgotten: “He hasn’t really settled in yet.”
And I sat there with no idea what I should have done differently. We had practiced. All summer long, every afternoon. He could write his name and count to twenty.
On paper, he was ready. And still, for six weeks, he never really settled in.
I tried to turn it around. We practiced even more after school, I talked to him about school, I pushed him into playdates he didn’t want. None of it changed anything — some of it made things worse.
At some point I stopped and hoped he’d grow out of it. He did grow out of it. It just took most of the school year.
What I only understood later: in all those months, Ben wasn’t invited to a single birthday party. The first invitation came in May.
Then it was his sister’s turn
Six weeks ago, Lily moved up to the pre-K class at her preschool. Next fall — 2027 — she starts kindergarten. A whole year away. And this time I promised myself I wouldn’t guess. This time I wanted to start early enough.
And yet I started exactly the way I did the first time. I ordered two books again. I asked in our moms’ group chat how everyone else was handling it. I read parenting forums at night until I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
Three weeks later, I had eleven opinions and no answer. One mom swore by workbooks starting in January, another said no pressure whatsoever, a third was sure pre-K would take care of it. And they all sounded convinced.
At some point I noticed what was wrong with my research: I’d been asking people who knew just as little as I did. Each of them had been through exactly one first day of kindergarten — their own child’s.
Through one of the teachers at Lily’s preschool, I was introduced to someone who has taught kindergarten for more than twenty years. Several hundred kindergartners, if you do the math. I asked if I could have an hour of her time to ask questions.
She said yes right away — and laughed: “Nobody ever asks me this a year ahead. In June, everybody does. Maybe it’ll help if it’s written down somewhere for once.”
Interviewed by Megan Porter in the fall of 2026, one year before her daughter starts kindergarten.
“I can see it in the first week”
Mrs. Donnelly, you told me on the phone that you can tell in the first week which kids are going to have a hard time. How?
Not by who cries. That’s the most common misconception. The kids who cry on the first day often have the easiest time — they show you what’s going on inside, and then you can work with it.
I look at something else: who asks? In the first week there are constant little moments where a child doesn’t know what to do next. Where’s the bathroom, where do my things go, what do I do if I didn’t understand something. Some kids just ask. Others stand there and wait for it to sort itself out.
Nobody notices that second group. They’re quiet, after all. And that’s exactly the problem.
What happens to a child like that in the weeks after?
It happens in the part of the school day you’ll never hear about as a parent: recess.
On every playground there are two or three kids at the edge. They’re not crying. They’re just standing there, usually near the wall, watching the others play. And when it’s time to line up, they’re first in line.
That’s twenty minutes. Every day. For the other kids, recess is the best part of the day — for these kids, it’s the part they just want to be over.
And that afternoon, this child is sitting across from you, you ask how it was, and they say: good. They’re not lying. They just have nothing to compare it to — they don’t know what school feels like when you belong. A child doesn’t report what they think is normal.
That’s why, at the first parent-teacher conferences in November, I have parents sitting across from me who are completely blindsided when I tell them their child hasn’t really settled in.
In the first few weeks, the class sorts itself out. Who plays with whom, who sits next to whom, who gets a spot saved in line every morning. A child who is still standing in the doorway on the inside doesn’t show up in any of that. After four or five weeks, it has turned into a role — and I’m not the one handing out the roles. The other kids are.
That role rarely gets recast. I’ve seen kids who were still “the one who couldn’t keep up at the start” in third grade — even though they had caught up long before. The gap was never academic. It was social.
But you can see it happening. Don’t you step in?
Of course I step in. I seat the child next to one who naturally walks up to other kids, I give them jobs where they have to talk to someone. But all of that only creates opportunities. I can’t order a child to belong, or to make friends.
You can see it in one sentence we say every single day: “Find a partner.” Ten seconds later, everyone has one — you pick someone you know. And whoever is still standing there isn’t missing their letters. They’re missing the right kind of preparation — and that happens in the year before the first day of school. Not in the weeks right before.
What I got wrong
But that’s exactly what I did. I bought workbooks, four of them, and all summer, every afternoon, we did a page — letters, numbers, tracing lines. Was that all for nothing?
Not for nothing — but aimed at the wrong thing. A workbook trains what a child can do. Letters, numbers, fine motor skills. None of that is bad, and kindergarten covers it anyway.
But your son didn’t struggle because of what he could or couldn’t do. He struggled because he didn’t put himself out there — didn’t join in, didn’t ask, didn’t speak up. Every child has to find their footing before they can take part. In that order, always. Your son never got past the first part — and while he was still working on it, the others had long since moved on. There’s no worksheet for that.
I’ve been telling parents this for years, and it’s the sentence I get the most pushback on:
What other three?
Whether a child can let go — at drop-off, without a parent promising to wait right outside. Whether they can connect — whether they know how to get into a game, and what they do when there’s a conflict. And whether they can manage on their own — jacket, lunch box, bathroom, asking where to go. I call that emotional, social, and practical readiness. Academic readiness is the fourth, and it’s the only one anybody practices at home.
It didn’t stop at the workbooks. I also read two parenting books, both well written. And when my son grabbed my sleeve at drop-off, I did exactly what both of them said: stay calm, keep the goodbye short, be clear. He cried anyway, as soon as I was around the corner — his teacher told me later. Why isn’t that enough?
Because parenting books tell you what to achieve, not what to do. “Help your child feel secure” — every parent nods at that. And then you’re standing at drop-off, and the question is still open: how, exactly?
In online forums, I found the opposite of every answer, too. Short goodbye, long goodbye, don’t push, act totally normal.
That’s because everyone is right — just for their own child. What helps a quiet, cautious kid makes things worse for a wound-up one. That’s why the advice contradicts itself. It isn’t wrong. It just doesn’t transfer.
What about pre-K? Lily goes three mornings a week.
Pre-K is good — and it doesn’t replace any of this. Pre-K practices in a room full of kids and grown-ups your daughter already knows. In my classroom, she won’t know anyone. And the most important thing pre-K can’t practice at all: saying goodbye to you. You can only practice that with the person you’re saying goodbye to.
Most people say kids grow out of it.
Kids grow out of a lot of things. The question is what happens in the meantime. A child who needs half a year to settle in has lost half a year in which the others were making friends.
And honestly, I almost only hear that from people who didn’t have to watch it happen.
The sentence I wrote down word for word
So what is it, Mrs. Donnelly? If it’s not the practicing and it’s not about courage — what is it?
It’s that parents practice what you can see — and school tests what you can’t.
Letters, numbers, writing their name: you can check those off, and there are workbooks for them. Letting go, walking up to someone, managing on your own, sticking with it: you can’t see those in a child at home, because at home everybody knows them and somebody is always there to help. And those aren’t skills. They’re habits.
A child can learn a skill in a week. For a five-year-old, a habit takes six to eight weeks before it runs without reminders. One child is missing this one, another child is missing that one. It still comes from the same place.
Your son could write his name. He didn’t know how to ask where he was supposed to go. How to get into a game. How to say goodbye without turning around three times. He had to walk through a door, and on the other side, everything nobody had ever seen at home was being tested.
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What should I have done instead?
Build the habits before school tests them. Not letters — the goodbye, the asking, the waiting, the sticking with it. In small doses, one at a time, over months. Whatever a child already does out of habit, she doesn’t have to tackle for the first time in the first week — her head is free to join in.
It sounds unspectacular, and it is. Ten minutes a day, as a game. Anything that feels like a chore turns into pushback — just like the daily workbook page.
Do you have an example?
A girl from my last kindergarten class — let’s call her Mia. Her parents started the fall before, a full year ahead of kindergarten. Nothing elaborate: a goodbye that always went the same way — at Grandma’s, at friends’ houses, at the preschool door. At dinner, they played out what happens when she needs the bathroom and doesn’t know where it is. And one sentence for getting into a game, practiced a hundred times with stuffed animals.
On the first day of school, she walked up to the line outside our classroom, waved to her mom, went in, and said to the boy next to her: “I’m Mia. Want to play?” Five years old.
She wasn’t braver than the other kids. She’d just done it a hundred times.
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“And that looks the same for every child?”
Can I just do the same thing with my daughter that Mia’s parents did?
No. And that’s exactly where most parents go wrong — they copy what worked for a different child.
A quiet, watchful child needs the exact opposite of a wound-up one. With one, you play out the goodbye a hundred times until it stops being scary. With the other, a long goodbye that’s always the same is what makes them unsure in the first place — that child needs a clear stop rule at recess and almost nothing at the door.
And the order matters. Every child needs all four areas. But for every child, a different one comes first — and there’s one that can safely wait.
So what should I be watching for with my daughter, specifically?
Four things. They tell me more about the first weeks of school than anything a child can already read or count.
- Letting go (emotional readiness): How does goodbye go — does your child wave and walk off, or look back three times?
- Joining in (social readiness): What happens around kids they don’t know — do they walk right over, watch for a long time, take charge?
- Managing on their own (practical readiness): Jacket, lunch box, bathroom, asking for help — without someone standing right there?
- Sticking with it (academic readiness): What happens when something doesn’t work right away — do they keep going or give up?
Answer those four honestly and you’ll have a pretty accurate picture. In twenty years, I haven’t seen a single child who was an automatic yes on all four.
But I know what my daughter is like. Shy, watches first. Isn’t that enough?
You know what she’s like. You don’t know what follows from it. That’s a difference — and honestly, it’s the one that matters.
Every year I meet parents who can describe their child perfectly. And then they draw the wrong conclusion. For most people, “shy” means: give her more time, don’t push her. For some kids that’s right. For others it’s the worst thing you can do, because it means they never end up in the very situation they need to practice.
You have the description. What you’re missing is the plan that comes out of it — where to start with this particular child, and what can wait.
And a plan like that — is there a ready-made one anywhere? I don’t want to spend another three weeks searching.
These days, yes. A few years ago, that didn’t exist. Now you’ll find several of these checks online — you answer questions about your child and then get a plan built on their results.
I’m not going to recommend a specific one; that’s not my place. But the approach is the right one: look first, then act. That’s the exact reverse of what most parents do.
Look at several. And pay attention to whether you actually get different results, or whether everyone ends up with the same exercises.
What I’m doing differently this time
I took her last piece of advice: I looked at several. Four, to be exact — over two evenings, with a notepad next to me.
Three were easy to rule out. With the first one, the result after five questions would have fit any child. The second was clearly made for toddlers — half the questions were about naps and sippy cups. The third only asked what my child could already do — letters, numbers, how she holds a pencil. The wrong question, if you’ve listened to Mrs. Donnelly.
The fourth was different. Twenty-four questions, and they were exactly the ones Mrs. Donnelly had listed: how my child reacts to new things, what she does when something doesn’t work right away, how goodbyes go, how she handles conflict, what she can do on her own. And it asked when Lily starts kindergarten — the only one of the four that did.
That’s when I realized: this one wasn’t telling me what preschoolers in general need. It was telling me what mine needs — and in what order.
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Lily’s result: eight areas, each on a scale, two of them in red — Letting Go and Getting Along. Mrs. Donnelly had called them emotional and social readiness. Plus a sentence about her that I read twice: the child who watches for a long time before joining in — and then doesn’t want to stop. It describes her exactly. I just never would have thought to put it that way myself.
The plan built on that result has two parts. One is for me: the Parent Guide. It sets the order — for Lily, the goodbye first, then recess, and what can safely wait until spring. Which phrases work with this child and which ones backfire. And the game plan for the first day of school, including the five things you shouldn’t say that morning. I said two of them to Ben at drop-off.
The other part is for Lily: four books, one per area, built from her answers — with her name, her personality, her two red areas first. And before we started, she got to choose where her plan takes place and who comes along. She picked Coral Cove, and Perla.
We’re in week three now. And what’s come out of it, I wouldn’t have guessed: Lily practices the goodbye on her own now. At the preschool door, she says her sentence before I can, and at dinner she explains to Perla who she’ll ask if she can’t find the bathroom. I don’t know if the first day of kindergarten will go well. But she’s no longer walking toward a door where everything happens for the first time.
There’s one more thing I did afterward, because I couldn’t let it go: I took the quiz a second time. Not for Lily — for Ben. The way he was two years ago, as honestly as I could remember.
The result left me speechless for a moment. It said a child like him waits in new situations for things to sort themselves out. That he’d rather sit with a question than ask it. And that kids exactly like that are easy to overlook in the first weeks — because they don’t speak up.
It was a description of what ended up happening. I could have had it a year before his first day of kindergarten, for two minutes of effort. Instead, I got it at a parent-teacher conference in October.
Two kids, same mom, same house — and two plans that contradict each other on almost every point.
It’s called Kinderbrave. It’s pretty new, so there aren’t piles of reviews yet — I went by the questions and by what came out for Lily. The quiz and the result are free; the full plan is $49, and it comes with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. I mention that because it’s the reason I tried it at all.
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What would have held me back
My child isn’t anxious at all — does this even apply to me?
This isn’t about anxious kids. It’s about kids who still have one of the four open — and that’s almost all of them. With some, you see it at drop-off. With others, you only see it three weeks later, in the stomachaches before school. And with the loud kids, you see it last.
A year feels like forever from now. Do I really have to start already?
Not because it’s a lot. Because this way, it’s a little. If you start now, you only ever work on one thing — and your summer stays free. If you start over the summer, you’re doing all four at once, every afternoon, with no buffer. That’s the summer you had with your son.
- Only one area at a time — six to eight weeks, then the next
- Ten minutes in the evening, as a game. Missing a night is no big deal
- The holidays, school breaks, and sick days are already built in
- By early summer, it’s all in place — and summer break stays free
- All four areas at once, in one summer
- Every afternoon at the kitchen table — just like with Ben
- No buffer, no fun, meltdowns by week two
- It still gets decided in the first weeks of school
And what if I can’t get to it until the summer anyway?
Then you don’t do the same thing, only faster — you do the one thing that matters most for this child. It’s later, but it’s not too late. Only: you already have to know which one that is. And you only know that if you’ve taken a close look first.
Isn’t all of this just common sense?
I asked myself the same thing afterward. And yes — looking back, it is. That’s exactly what’s so frustrating.
I could have figured all of this out on my own. I just had no idea what to look for. Nobody tells you ahead of time that “habits” is the keyword — not “letters.” It took me two parenting books, half a year of forums, and one rough start to kindergarten. A teacher explained it to me in five minutes.
What I’d tell my sister
My sister’s son starts kindergarten in 2028. If I could pass along just one sentence from this conversation, it would be this one: Stop preparing only for academic readiness, and start on the other three. Kids learn their letters in kindergarten — that’s what it’s for. What they need beforehand are four habits that are already in place on the first day — so they’re not busy just finding their way, but free to belong.
With Ben, I didn’t know that. With Lily, I do.
That’s the sentence for my sister. The rest is for you — because you’re probably here for the same reason I was reading forums in the middle of the night.
You have two options now. You can close this article and keep doing what you’ve been doing — maybe it’ll turn out fine. For us, “keep doing what we’ve been doing” cost most of a school year. Or you can take two minutes, answer a few questions about your child, and know where they stand — and what to start with this year.
I know which one I wish I’d picked sooner.
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My oldest had an easy start to kindergarten. Now it’s my youngest’s turn, and I can tell it’s going to be completely different this time. Is that possible?
Yes — I lived through exactly that, just the other way around. Siblings often need completely opposite things. What came naturally with the first child has to be prepared with the second. And vice versa. That’s exactly why it doesn’t help much to repeat what worked the first time.
Our son starts kindergarten in 2027. Does it make sense to think about this already, or will we just drive ourselves crazy?
What drives you crazy is the opposite — when suddenly there are only four weeks left. That was my summer with Ben. A year means ten minutes in the evening, one area after another. A child doesn’t even notice it as preparation — and that’s exactly how it should be.
What do you actually do if your child cries at drop-off anyway? I’m scared of doing the wrong thing in that moment.
That was my biggest fear — and back then, I improvised in the moment: smiled, waved, hoped. It was the first time we had ever said goodbye like that, and that was exactly the mistake. The point from the interview that helped me most: the goodbye isn’t decided at drop-off. It’s decided in the months before.
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