The world has gone crazy: I am convinced that preparing children for school from the age of three is the primary responsibility of any parent. Moreover, preparing for school does not mean reading aloud fairy tales and then acting out stories with dolls. Now, preparation for school is considered "to take children to courses at the future gymnasium, otherwise they will not get there at all, and his brilliant career will not take place." What career, what are you talking about? He is five years old, his whole bright prospect now looks like "and I'll throw a ball on the roof of the barn or not, and what will I get for it?"
It is much easier to take the children by car to the courses (or send them with a nanny and a chauffeur) than to do all these dreary and routine operations: plasticine, paints, everything stuck to the carpet, dad stumbles about the designer, for a children's theater everything is shaken out of the closet, children make noise, running, quarreling, crying, demanding participation. These endless: "Mom, let you be a wolf, and I am Little Red Riding Hood." Or, which is completely intolerable: "I don't want to do anything, give me an iPad." This is where you feel like the worst mother in the Universe and … you start to pack your backpack "for class." Uf. For three hours, everyone is busy: the child is kind of developing, and I'm kind of busy.
In these courses, with rare exceptions, children are taught: to sit at a desk “correctly”, not to run, not to make noise, hold a pencil correctly, paint according to a template, and trace the lines.
The child comes out tired, de-energized, and they pile up on him homework, and even scold him for spinning around in the lesson. Not because the aunts are evil, but because they don't know any other way, they are not trained. They themselves were brought up that way, which is why they are teachers. Malvins against a heap of Buratin.
Although the only norm for a preschool child is just to spin. And poke your curious nose into everything. And keep asking. And grab everything. And also fight, run, build Easter cakes and relationships, compose and spill dirty water on yourself while drawing.
The main task of childhood, irreplaceable and irreplaceable later, is to play enough. If you need scientific evidence and research results, read the works of Vygotsky, Nina Gutkina, articles by Mariana Bezrukikh, foreign publications. In a free, unstructured game, all the necessary functions, skills and abilities are formed.
Therefore, I insist: the main form of preparing six-year-old children for school should be play.
Want some examples? You are welcome.
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1. Ball games. We develop voluntary attention, concentration (you need to follow the ball), coordination and dexterity (without which it is then difficult to understand geometry, and other exact sciences). If this is a game with the rules, and not just running around, then the child learns to follow the queue, to reckon with partners, to follow strict rules. Do you see that this is all just a list of "difficult behaviors" in which first graders are put on ADHD and put on tranquilizers? Restless, shouts from a place, bully, cannot sit out a lesson. So he did not run, did not jump, they put him ahead of time at the desk!
2. Salki, hide and seek, all kinds of "Shtandert-stop" and Cossack robbers. The same thing: obedience to the rules, the ability to cope with a loss.
3. Endless lego and other cubes. Spatial thinking, understanding the basic laws of mechanics, the composition of the number (how many small details are needed to replace one long beam? Why is this arc not enough to connect the two ends?). Ability to lead a project, finish to the end, keep focus, collaborate. The most important thing is that parents complain about the absence of which later: the ability to create an image in the head, to invent and compose.
4. Any card games, "walkers", loto. Arbitrary attention, concentration, foresight, strategy. And a quick mental arithmetic.
5. My favorite "Bulls and Cows". We train phonemic hearing, spelling, reaction speed. I play bull and cow with my six-year-old niece. As long as there were three letters, and we played by texting on Skype, everything went fine. Two months later, Duska began to guess the words in just seven moves. Then we started playing live. We decided to switch to four-letter words. And here I was in trap. Duska cannot guess my word, although she seems to have picked up all the letters, but she cannot put them together. Okay, he says, I give up. I call it “lighthouse”. “Nothing,” Dusya yells. "There are five letters!" "How five ?!" I jump up. Well, of course, a literate, reading girl who knows everything about Krylov by heart answers me, “M-o-y-a-k”. And if they played in writing, they would never know.
6. Easter cakes, construction of tunnels in the sandbox, explosions in the mud and throwing stones at the fence. Physical properties of matter, tactile sensations, immersion in oneself, the ability to fantasize. And you want to replace all this by sitting at a desk and drawing squares by cells? Neither the brain, nor the psyche, nor the body of the child is designed for this. The only people who benefit from getting ready for school are the teachers. Which also need to feed your children.
Nina Iosifovna Gutkina, who taught me developmental psychology, repeated each course like a spell: until the age of seven, the structures in the brain that are responsible for recognizing symbols, that is, for reading and recognizing numbers, are not formed in children. Yes, of course, it is possible and necessary to acquaint children with letters, preferably on improvised objects, in between things, in a game and a walk. Learn to read from signs like Mayakovsky. But not to demand that he read thick books for school. All this will come later, in due time.
Stop reading all sorts of mothers' communities and listening to your friends, for whom "a boy at the age of five is already spitting Bunin by heart." Firstly, spilling something by heart is not about the ability to read, but about memory and a stubborn grandmother. Second, the ability to read at an early age is not an indicator at all. No intelligence, no learning ability, much less your parenting skills.
So they took the children under the armpit and onto the playground. If you yourself can’t be able to - hire Malvina, 13 years old, let her graze and fulfill her teaching needs. Just don't drag the poor fellow to get ready for school. He is already happy for 11 years.
Katerina Demina