To be ready for school and https://argoprep.com/blog/what-is-digital-literacy-and-why-does-it-matter/, a child must: have a certain level of development of intellectual, emotional, volitional qualities; have some initial skills and abilities; be ready to communicate and interact with peers, and most importantly, want to study at school. Let’s discuss these issues in more detail.
The child is developing. His physical, intellectual, spiritual and other qualities develop. The development of these qualities occurs under the constant influence of the environment – the environment, parents and other close relatives, television, etc. But the pace of development is individual. Therefore, the influence of the environment does not have the same effect on different children. The most important role here is played by the needs of the child himself. The child strives to fulfill the requirements of the environment only when they correspond to his needs, for example, they give him the opportunity to take the position among others that he himself aspires to. This is worth paying attention to, as parents are often surprised: “I do all sorts of developmental exercises with him from morning to night, and he is all capricious and does not learn how to perform them correctly!” Here we clearly see the overwhelming superiority of the needs of the parent over the needs of the child.
From birth, the child is included in many different types of activities – direct emotional communication with an adult, objective activity, play, learning, https://argoprep.com/blog/educators/fake-news-examples-for-students-and-how-to-find-the-facts/ etc. Psychologists have found that the development of the psyche just happens within a certain activity, moreover, at different age periods within different types of activity .
They called the corresponding activity the leading one. So at an early age, subject activity was singled out as the leading activity, at preschool age – play, at primary school – teaching. It is the leading activity that causes the main changes in the development of mental processes and personal characteristics of children in a specific age period.
One of the important aspects of school readiness (perhaps the most important!) is learning motivation. Psychologists believe that learning motivation consists of cognitive, social and achievement motives. Cognitive motives are children’s interest in learning new, unknown, the need to reason, reflect, acquire new knowledge, skills and abilities. Social motives are associated with the child’s need to communicate with other people – peers and adults – the need to receive their assessment, approval; the desire to take their place in the world of people – children and adults, to get a new social status (for example, the status of a student, or even the status of an excellent student). The achievement motive is the desire of the child to receive specific expected results from their activities.
For successful schooling, the presence of all of these motives is important. The fact is that even in the presence of pronounced cognitive motives, a child can cool down to learning activities due to the presence of difficult and sometimes uninteresting tasks in it. For example, writing is a serious problem for first-graders. The letter itself does not cause any cognitive interest, and in the absence of pronounced social motives (the desire to get approval from the teacher, parents, the desire to get closer to becoming an adult) quickly leads to fatigue and displeasure from educational activities.
