Do you think this is a teacher’s whim? Not at all. It turns out that such tasks are very useful.
Remember how we chose shorter poems when we were asked in literature to learn the creation of this or that author? Quite understandable aspiration. What is explainable? Laziness, of course. Although it is called the engine of progress, laziness is still not the best and most useful quality. Now let’s remember how older people grumble that today’s youth is not at all what they were in their days. And more stupid, and more irresponsible, and they cannot connect two words. Where is the connection, you ask? She is the most direct, you will not believe it.
There is a book called Plastic Brain. Awesome facts about how thoughts can change the structure and function of our brains. ” Written by Norman Doidge. He talks about the neuroplasticity technique, which is still new and, one might say, revolutionary, but has already shown good results. The book contains specific stories of coping with emotional disturbances and learning disabilities.
The author of the neuroplasticity technique Barbara Arrowsmith-Young recommends, among other things, learning the texts by heart. It turns out that it helps develop neural connections in the brain.
“For hundreds of years, educators have known that children’s brains must be shaped through exercises of increasing difficulty to enhance brain function. Throughout the XNUMXth century and at the beginning of the XNUMXth, classical education included the rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthens auditory verbal memory, ”the author writes.
In the 60s, all these exercises were excluded from the school curriculum, they seemed too boring and irrelevant. Now they generally seem to be archaism: why memorize anything at all, when you can ask Google anything at any time. And then, for children, such exercises are often the only opportunity to systematically train the brain functions, on which the speed of word recognition and understanding depends. Refused to train – we got a weakening of the premotor cortex of the brain. This weakening is now compensated by external means – Power Point presentations, for example, or electronic prompts.
– Memorizing any material is very useful. And at any age. During memorization, certain zones are activated in the brain and neural connections are formed, which are responsible for the development of high-quality speech. They contribute to the development of memory, increase its volume, improve the child’s learning ability and receptivity to new information. The more new neural connections a child has, the easier it is for him to learn, the greater the potential of his memory for assimilating new information at school, the easier it is to build his oral speech, to formulate his thoughts.
The specialist explains that personal mnemonics are formed in children practically from infancy. These can be associations, images, codes, semantic nodes – whatever. But these will be exactly the methods of memorization that suit your child.
A rhyme memorized by heart helps the child build his own rhythm, which is important for the unstable nervous system of young children. It turns out that the child forms his own arsenal of relaxing and balancing his psyche means.
At first glance, this is not the most obvious benefit of memorizing poetry by heart. As a rule, rarely anyone pays attention, but when a child gets tired or feels overwhelmed with emotions, he can hum to himself, tell some kind of rhyme, recite the same rhyme many, many times.
For schoolchildren, it is no longer just the rhythm and type of information that is important, but also its meaning. It is practically useless to memorize some pieces of information without comprehending, you still need to analyze it. For example, texts in a foreign language are better remembered if they are translated into Russian. Or take the multiplication table. It is important to explain to the child that “4 × 8 = 32” because the number 4 was added to itself eight times. Then the table becomes not just a collection of dry information, but lively and understandable.
Of course, there is a certain amount of information that you just need to remember, it is difficult to explain it logically. And this is where the mnemonics developed by the child come in handy. And what if they are not there? Don’t despair. The brain is such a thing that it is never too late to develop.