It is known that children from 6, 5 to 7, 5 years old are admitted to the first grade. But it's official. And before each specific parent of a 5 or 6-year-old child, the question arises: when is it necessary to send my child to school? And it is necessary to solve it, proceeding not from parental ambitions or considerations of convenience, but only from how exactly this baby is ready for a new stage in his life.
It is clear that each child develops at his own pace, and with the same opportunities, one will be ahead of the other in some way, in some way inferior to him. But there are criteria for a child's readiness for school, which psychologists do not advise to neglect.
Experts do not talk about the child's readiness for learning in grade 1 in general, they distinguish the following types of it: physical, physiological, mental, psychological, personal, motivational, speech, intellectual, etc. And, of course, it will be better if a preschooler who is going become a first grader, was prepared for such an important step in all these areas.
Psychological readiness
This aspect is determined, first of all, by the extent to which the child realizes that a new stage in his life begins - the period of apprenticeship. Psychologists can determine how psychologically ready a child is for him. For this purpose, testing of future first-graders is carried out in preschool institutions and in centers of psychological and pedagogical counseling. We can say that the psychological readiness of a child to start schooling is determined by the entire system of his upbringing and development in previous years.
Personal and motivational readiness
This component of a child's general readiness for school is determined by how much a small person understands that he has to prove himself in a new social role - the role of a student, a schoolboy. It is important here how much the future first-grader strives to gain new knowledge, build new relationships (with school friends, teachers), how positively he is generally positive about his future school life.
The child's motivation also plays an important role. If the question "Why do you want to go to school?" he confidently answers that he wants to learn new things, learn something interesting, etc. - in this case, educational motivation is clearly expressed, which, of course, is good. If, in response to the question posed, the child says that at school he will make new friends with whom it will be interesting to spend time, play, this indicates that the most important motive for such a child is play, and psychologically he not ready yet. They talk about insufficient psychological readiness both external ("because mom and dad said so") and social ("I will study, because it is necessary", "in order to get a profession and work") motives.
Physical and mental readiness
It is also important how harmoniously the child developed in the preschool period, how successfully and timely he passed all the psychophysical stages of early adulthood, whether his physical and mental health is normal, whether there is a lag in development from this point of view.
If a child is practically healthy and has developed normally, then it is considered that he is ready for schooling at the age of 6, 5 - 7 years. One of the indirect signs of a child's physical readiness for school is the beginning of the process of replacing milk teeth with molars. There are also more exotic tests of physiological readiness. For example, Tibetan children are considered fit for schooling if they can reach the upper edge of the opposite ear by stretching their hand over their heads.
A pediatrician and medical specialists will help to determine more precisely how physiologically a child is ready for school life. Every child in our country undergoes a medical commission before entering school.
Intellectual and speech readiness
Many parents motivate their desire to send their child to school early precisely by the fact that their child “reads from the age of 4, and from the age of 6 speaks English and knows the multiplication table”. Of course, the general baggage of knowledge is important for the future student, but, determining his intellectual readiness for schooling, experts look not only and not so much at the amount of knowledge and skills accumulated by the preschooler at the beginning of educational activity, but at the degree of formation of such mental operations as analysis, synthesis, the ability to draw logical conclusions, highlight the main thing, an understanding of cause-and-effect relationships and spatio-temporal relationships.
Closely related to the intellectual aspect and speech. It is clear that if the child's speech is not sufficiently developed, the vocabulary is poor, then many mental operations are still beyond his strength. By the beginning of schooling, the child must correctly and cleanly pronounce all the sounds of his native language, be able to construct sentences grammatically correctly - his success in learning Russian directly depends on this. The vocabulary of a future first grader should be at least 1500 - 2000 words.
Thus, whether to send their child to school from the age of 6, or wait until the age of 7, is, of course, up to the parents to decide. But it is still worth listening to the opinion of experts.
