Concerns about school readiness often cause parents and caregivers to emphasize academic skills during the preschool years. In the year before kindergarten, it may be possible for children to learn to count and to learn letter names and some letter sounds. However, these are not really the important skills for kindergarten readiness. Children can learn numbers and letters easily once they enter kindergarten or first grade. There are much more important things to learn during the preschool years, things that will provide a more important foundation for school success. These are what we call the essential cognitive foundations. These Essential Cognitive Foundations include: a strong knowledge base sufficient to support comprehension, drawing inferences, and making predictions, problem solving skills, a growing ability to "inter-translate" between language and mental representations so that knowledge and thoughts can be expressed in language (productive language) and knowledge can be formed on the basis of incoming information (receptive language), a set of attitudinal and self-management skills that include attention management, comprehension monitoring, and persistence. Children with these cognitive foundations in place will be ready to meet the intellectual demands associated with formal schooling. Capable kindergarten and first-grade teachers will find it relatively easy to teach early reading and number skills to children who have a rich knowledge base, good language skills, listening comprehension and attention management skills, and a positive attitude toward learning and toward themselves as learners. Last updated: November 14, 1997 by Charles S. Yang