School readiness, it turns out, is not just about skills and knowledge and https://argoprep.com/math/1st-grade/addition/commutative-law/.
Psychological readiness for school is like a snowman. Everyone has heard of it. Everyone knows that it’s some important thing that is tested by psychologists with some clever tests. They talk about it now and then in the cool schools and gymnasiums, but no one has any idea what it is.
But with arithmetic or reading or first grade sight words everything is much easier – now it’s common to read and write right from the crib. And if by some absurd coincidence a child under the age of five or six didn’t learn it, he could easily be taught these wisdoms at any pre-school or kindergarten course in the year before school.
But what about psychology? What is the mysterious psychological readiness for school? Or maybe a child has had it for a long time, and we do not know about it?
Psychologists have identified four types of psychological readiness for school and shsat.
Personal and Social Readiness
Personal and social readiness lies in the fact that the child, by the time he enters school, is ready to communicate and interact – both with adults and peers.
In fact, today’s first graders are not always able to do this. It is especially difficult for them to perform tasks which require joint efforts, close contact with each other. More often this symptom is expressed in “home” children who have never attended kindergarten – these kids have minimal experience in resolving conflict situations, making joint decisions.
Does your child easily come into contact with other children and adults? Don’t you often take on his or her functions? For example, when the psychologist asks the future first-grader what his name is, his mother readily answers: “Our name is Sasha!”.
By the time the child enters school, he or she should have a rather diverse experience of communicating with unfamiliar people. Allow him to establish contacts with others in the clinic, on the playground, in a store, etc.
“Home” children are often afraid of crowds of people. Truth be told, not all adults are comfortable in a crowd. But do not forget that the baby will live in a community, and so try sometimes to get out to some public events, to take a child to the station or the airport – the experience of “survival in the crowd.
Emotional-willful readiness
“And I won’t, because it’s not interesting (too easy, or, on the contrary, too difficult)!” Why does a child who did brilliantly before school with a private teacher sometimes get a deep disappointment from school?
Of course, a lot depends on the teacher, and the education system, which, alas, leaves much to be desired and is designed for the average student. But it’s not just about that.
After all, lessons for preschoolers and real lessons are still different things. If the first – first of all, the game (and otherwise simply will not work, no normal preschooler, unless he is a super wunderkind, of course, would not prefer a lesson to a game), the latter – is a learning system. And not always this learning will be fun and exciting. Therefore, a very important sign of readiness for school is not only to do what I want, but also what is necessary, not afraid of difficulties, to solve them independently.
Ironically, to develop these qualities will help again the game. Only a special game – by the rules (from the primitive “walkers” with the cube to chess, “Memori”, dominoes, etc.). After all, these games teach to wait quietly for his turn, with dignity lose, build their strategy and thus take into account constantly changing circumstances, etc.
It is useful if a child will get used to the change of activities in advance – for example, calm work at the table will alternate with movement games (it is especially important for excitable, mobile children). So it will be easier for them to restrain their impulse to get up and run in the middle of the class, because they will know that there is a special “noisy time” for this.
Intellectual readiness
It’s not about the proverbial ability to read and write, but about something bigger: how ready a child’s brain is for intellectual work. It is the ability to think, to analyze, to draw conclusions.
Analytical thinking (the ability to compare and generalize) starts to develop from infancy – from that happy time when your baby was interested in rattling different rattles, listening to their sound, and tried to figure out why the ball from the slide perfectly rolls, and the cube somehow refuses to do it.
If you do not suppressed the exploratory interest of a young naturalist, by the time entering school he probably learned a lot from his own experience. Teach your son or daughter to look for answers to their endless “why” and “what will happen if…”, to build cause-and-effect connections – in a word, to be actively interested in the world around them.
Motivational readiness
By the time a child enters school, he or she should have a positive attitude:
Toward school;
teacher;
Toward learning activities;
to himself.
Often older friends have time to instill in the future schoolchild the idea that at school he expects only trouble – “D’s”, strict teachers, etc. Try to dispel this myth and set the kid up for success. At the same time, he/she needs to understand that the school path is strewn with more than just roses, and no one will praise him/her there just for fun or even for every little thing.
If a child is used to constant praise and approval at home, try to accustom him or her to greater independence, praise not for each step, but for the final result. While praising and cursing your treasure, don’t get into personalities – evaluate the action, not the child.
It turns out that psychological readiness for school is the whole preschool life. But even a few months before school it is possible, if necessary, to make some adjustments and help the future first-grader to enter the new world calmly and joyfully.