Tips for School Readiness at Home:1. Talk with your child. Encourage expressions of feelings and find time to share love and appreciation. These moments build your child’s confidence and ability to communicate and collaborate.2. Read to your child. Instilling a love of reading will allow your child to learn content throughout their lives and also builds vocabulary, literacy learning, and even perspective taking.3. Play with your child. Blocks, active games, and silly moments all forge communication and collaboration and nurture cognitive skills such as impulse control, working memory, and regulating behaviors.4. Experience nature. The natural world is a laboratory that encourages risk, critical thinking, observation, imagination, and creative innovation. 5. Build social-emotional skills. Building emotional literacy (recognizing feelings, naming them, and knowing how to manage them) is good for school and great for life. Practice social skills like meeting a new person, separating for parents, managing feelings, sharing, joining into play, and more are the most valued school readiness skills from teachers.6. Develop a growth mindset. Believing in your own personal abilities and growing a sense of determination are skills you can encourage in a young child. Use process praise (e.g. you never gave up!) versus product praise (e.g. you are so smart).  This focus on abilities, tenacity, and growth can influence school success more than IQ.7. Learn to love learning. Lifelong learning is a lifelong pursuit but many children begin to lose enthusiasm for learning as they get older.  Make sure learning is fun and exciting by pursuing children’s interests, building learning into everyday experiences, and avoiding a focus on right/wrong.