Children often have questions about lunch. Knowing this is a point of tension for children, in junior kindergarten programs it is important to do fun activities to teach children about school lunch. One way to teach children about options for lunch is to show pictures of children eating from lunch sacks or boxes and eating on school trays. Ask the children what is fun about bringing a lunch and what is fun about eating school lunch. Set up a chart of all the parts of lunch. Some ideas for the chart are walking to the lunchroom, finding the kindergarten table, going through the food line and putting lunch away after eating. Children put a sticker on each lunch activity as they master it.
Questions about "How will I go to the bathroom at kindergarten" are common. Junior kindergarten programs address toileting questions in fun ways to motivate children. They teach children about bathrooms in the classroom and bathrooms in the building and the rules of the use for each one. One way to make this fun is to make bathroom passes out of paper that say, "I know the rules." Take a field trip around the school to find bathrooms. When each one is found, ask the children questions about the rules of use. Give each child a bathroom pass who can give a rule. Let the children glue their bathroom passes to a piece of paper to take home.
Prekindergarten children generally have some degree of separation anxiety. Junior kindergarten programs address these fears by letting the children ask questions they have about being left at school. Programs work with families upfront to help them do fun activities at home to support their children at drop-off. A fun activity parents can do is read books about going to school and talk with their child about the fun parts of the story. Drawing pictures about going to school is also a fun activity.
Fear of the unknown is a large part of a child's trepidation about kindergarten. Junior kindergarten programs provide children fun experiences to teach them about the parts of the kindergarten day. Children learn to sing songs about how to wash hands, how to put work away and how to wait for groups. Singing songs while learning the activity is fun and effective in answering questions about the unknown.