Is the child ready for school? We decide for ourselves

There are different approaches to diagnosing a child’s readiness for learning. Often parents try to find the answer themselves. Bookstores offer free access to dozens of colorful publications that attract attention and promise to answer a disturbing question.

Many parents, educators and teachers assess readiness for school by the presence of certain knowledge, skills and abilities. It is mainly only about intellectual readiness for learning. From the point of view of the psychologist Nina Gutkina, who has been dealing with this problem for many years, psychological readiness manifests itself in a certain development of the motivational, voluntary, intellectual and speech spheres.

By the end of preschool age, children have learning motivation. This is expressed in the fact that a child of 6-7 years old wants to satisfy the need for knowledge, as well as take a new place in society, take the first step towards adulthood. A neoplasm is formed – “the internal position of the student.” It becomes important for the child to be assessed by significant adults: “Did I do the right thing?”, “What mark would you give me?”. And the first teacher becomes such an adult, whose authority, especially in the first grade, becomes higher than the authority of parents. Do not be offended if you hear your comments and attempts to help: “You are speaking incorrectly, the teacher explained to us differently.” Show patience and tact, because support, emotional sensitivity are simply necessary for a newly minted first grader.

For successful schooling, a sufficient level of development of an arbitrary sphere is necessary. The ability to control behavior is very important. Now you have to do not only what you want at the moment, but also perform not very attractive tasks. Also, the child must be ready to comply with certain requirements: you can’t talk during the lesson, walk around the classroom, shout from the floor, and many other “you can’t”. Arbitrary regulation of actions, in particular, work according to the model and according to the rule, simultaneously characterizes the development of the intellectual sphere.

The child must have good learning ability, which includes two stages of intellectual operations: the assimilation of a new rule of work, for example, to solve a problem, and the transfer of the learned rule to similar tasks.

The speech of a preschooler also indicates the level of his intellectual development. One of the reasons for poorly developed speech is poor phonemic hearing. The child does not distinguish between phonemes, which leads to incorrect pronunciation and, as a result, to incorrect spelling of words. For future first-graders, it is fundamentally important to be able to distinguish various sounds in words by ear, since the modern method of teaching reading is based on the sound analysis of a word.

To diagnose psychological readiness, you can contact a psychologist, for example, in a kindergarten or school. But, if this is not possible, parents can independently understand how ready the child is for learning in the first grade.

About motivational readiness indirectly can be judged by the following manifestations:

1. The child wants to go to school and is happy to discuss this topic with his parents.
2. Shows curiosity, is interested in things that are incomprehensible to him.
3. He loves when books are read to him and listens to them with pleasure.
4. For a long time he can independently engage in constructor, modeling, drawing, playing.
5. Not afraid to make a mistake when learning something new, while at the same time showing perseverance and perseverance in mastering this skill.
6. Strives to earn the praise of a significant adult by completing a task.

About intellectual readiness skills say:

1. Play samples. It is very important that a child can copy a building from a constructor, a sample from a mosaic, copy a picture or color according to a model, reproduce a rhythm, copy a movement. Most of the work in the first grade is built on this skill.
2. Play role-playing games and games with rules. The child must subordinate the behavior to the rules of the game, be able to take on a particular role. In the future, this will help to easily enter the role of a student who obeys certain rules of conduct in the classroom, recess, in the dining room.
3. Carefully color the pictures with colored pencils, without going beyond the outline.
4. Solve riddles.
5. Classify items according to essential features: what applies to items of clothing, dishes, furniture, transport, and so on.
6. Listen to books and answer questions about what you read.
7. Talk about what you read in a book, saw in a cartoon, or what happened on a walk.
8. Compose a story based on a picture and a series of sequential plot pictures.
9. Ask questions and answer questions.
10. Highlight sounds in words.

If a child knows how to do all this, then you can be sure that he is psychologically ready for school and will be able to cope with the first grade curriculum.