Parents who find Veritas are usually serious about education. That's a good thing. The rigor of the curriculum, the intentionality of the classical sequence, the long view of what education is for — all of it attracts families who are paying attention and want to do right by their children.

That same seriousness sometimes produces a particular kind of anxiety: what should I be doing before kindergarten?

The honest answer is simpler than most parents expect. Not much — at least not formally.

Why Formal Education Can Wait

Children between the ages of two and five are doing some of the most important developmental work of their lives, but formal academic instruction is not part of it.

In the toddler years, children are developing fine and gross motor skills, learning to coordinate their bodies, building the physical foundation for everything else. They are beginning to use sentences, exploring language, developing emotional awareness, and learning how to play cooperatively with other children. By four, their motor skills are improving steadily. By five, their speech is developing rapidly, their social interactions are growing more complex, and their physical coordination has advanced enough that skipping down a hallway is suddenly possible.

Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at the University of California Berkeley and author of The Philosophical Baby, has found that pretend play helps children understand themselves and their world, supports better adjustment in school, and develops flexible and sophisticated thinking. Joanne Kelly, a literacy and language expert at Harvard, argues that the most important thing a parent can do to help a child learn to read is create a language-rich environment at home — not through direct instruction, but through ordinary interaction with the world. Pointing out the duck on the walk, connecting it to the duck in last night's book, talking about what ducks do and where they live. That kind of conversation is early literacy. It just doesn't look like a lesson.

The view that young children are simply small adults who learn the way adults learn has not been taken seriously by developmental researchers for a long time. Children's bodies and minds are still learning to work together. The developmental process they are moving through is real and important, and it unfolds most successfully when parents recognize and respect its stages.

R.C. Sproul's Reminder

R.C. Sproul once spoke at a parent night for a classical school that the author of this post was involved in starting. When someone asked how parents could instill a love of learning in their children, his answer was immediate and has stayed ever since.

It is not our job to instill a love of learning, he said. God has already done that. It is our job not to kill it.

That observation ought to slow down every parent who is tempted to push formal education earlier than a child is ready for it. The curiosity is already there. The wonder is already there. What young children need most is not a curriculum. They need space to explore, time to play, and adults who delight in the world alongside them.

What to Do Instead

None of this means parents should do nothing. It means doing the right things.

Read to your children. Start early and read often. There is no age too young to be read to, and books fill children with language, story, and curiosity in ways that compound over time. The Literature curriculum that begins in earnest at Veritas in 2nd grade assumes students who already love books. That love is built in these years.

Play with letters and numbers through games rather than lessons. One approach that works well: pick a letter one day a week and eat things throughout the day that begin with it. B day might mean banana pancakes and bacon for breakfast, a bagel with blueberry cream cheese at lunch, and burritos with broccoli at dinner. Nothing formal. Just playful, repeated exposure that sticks.

Sing songs. The nursery rhymes that adults still remember decades later were learned in exactly this period, in exactly this way. The same neural window that makes those songs stick is the one that Memory Period is designed to use once formal schooling begins.

Create an environment full of language, curiosity, and warmth. Let your children see you reading. Let them see you learning. Let them see that the world is interesting and that adults find it so.

The Rigor Comes Soon Enough

It may seem paradoxical for Veritas to say this. The curriculum is genuinely rigorous, and it begins in kindergarten with purpose and intention. But that rigor is built on a foundation of readiness. A child who has spent four years playing, exploring, being read to, and developing normally arrives at formal schooling ready for it.

Pushing earlier doesn't produce better outcomes. It often produces the opposite — children who associate learning with pressure before they've had the chance to discover that learning is one of life's great pleasures.

Enjoy these years. They move faster than you think. The curriculum will be there when the time is right.

When your child is ready to begin formal schooling, The Veritas Approach to Reading and Phonics and The Veritas Approach to Memory Period are good places to start.