How to prepare a child for school - advice from Olga Azova
I believe that there is no need at all to prepare children for school in the way they do now. It even sounds somehow absurd: preparing for school. What will we do at school then if we have learned to read and write? How do you cook anyway?
Train your muscles.
When preparing for school, it is necessary to deal with the physical development of the child. Many modern children are physically very weak. They play little, jump and run little, and don’t know how to play role-playing games. If a child has not learned to hold a pen, stroke, and does not know how to button buttons and lace shoes, it will be more difficult for him to master the skill of writing and learn in general.
Motor development greatly stimulates the brain, forms new neural connections, and stimulates the centers that are responsible for speech and motor functions.
When a child comes to me for a consultation, I do not immediately sit him down at the table, offering pictures. I carefully watch how the child enters my office: does he touch the door frames, does he fall over on his side, does he limp, does he walk on his toes, does he shift from one foot to the other.
Prepare for the fact that your child will need to be static for a long time: train the muscles of the back and leading arm (adaptive physical activity, general massage with an emphasis on the muscles that are involved in the act of writing, biofeedback training for the leading arm and back muscles).
Train your balance.
A bicycle is a means of transportation for a child, so when walking, the child should ride the bicycle, and not the father’s bicycle.
Use other opportunities to train your balance: jump on a trampoline, try different exercises, swing on a swing, walk on a balance beam, do exercises on a stability ball.
A well-developed balance is a support for the development and coordination of functions that form writing and counting skills.
It is good that the child is ready neurologically and psychologically for school.
If there is some kind of pathology, then you need to think about how to help him. Let's say a child with speech disorders. This child should remain in the sight of the speech therapist and be supervised by him. It is better for such a child to be observed by a psychologist and neuropsychologist.
Before school, play a lot of role-playing, rules-based, story-based and other games.
Play is a motivation for learning. A child should play a lot before school. When a child plays, he builds relationships in the game. Games have rules and order. This is the only way to painlessly change the leading activity: from gaming to educational. Then the child begins to understand the learning task, and not just play with an eraser and pencil.
Learn to listen.
Of course, you need to watch it too. But a huge flow of information comes through the ears, especially if the teacher is teaching. For women, the auditory method of communication is more typical. Boys, on the contrary, are more suited to the visual type. And in general, it’s easier for children when the task is given not only by ear, but also written down. Many mothers know that if the teacher does not write homework on the board, the child believes that nothing was assigned. I didn't hear.
Learn to hear, train auditory perception, “phonemic hearing” (distinguishing sounds that are similar in sound). Use Tomatis (method for developing auditory perception). Learn to answer questions and respond.
By school, the child must learn to speak spontaneously.
Teach your child to retell, tell, fantasize. If a child has difficulty finding words (cannot name the word “garage”, “fountain” in the picture), makes many grammatical errors (trees - “trees”), does not pronounce the whole word (thermometer - “temomet”, “temom”), cannot pronounce sounds (misses, replaces, distorts), his “phonemic hearing” is impaired, then he definitely needs to work with a speech therapist .
7. It is necessary to develop visual-motor and auditory-motor coordination.
I hear, I write, I see, I write. If children do not retain instructions well or are not taught, for example, to memorize a sentence and then write it based on memory, then they begin to copy almost every letter or look at the teacher after each written word during dictation. These children need some kind of training. You need to learn to retain information in memory, starting with sentences of two words, and so on up to six words.
Train your auditory-verbal memory: learn poetry! Nothing trains your memory better than memorizing a quatrain every day. Maintain this form throughout your life. If a child has problems with perception and memory, then he needs to work with a neuropsychologist who will stimulate these functions.
It is important to decide on lateralization and which hand the child will write with.
Neurophysiologists and neuropsychologists ask you to decide on your leading hand, eye, leg . Why do we need to decide? In order to determine the type of child and, possibly, the type of learning. If a child is right-brained: he has an eye and a right ear, maybe he is a future artist or musician. This should be taken into account when choosing a program. And if we send such an emotional, artistic, creative child to a class to learn according to Peterson, it will not be easy for him there. Because he is not a logician, not a mathematician.
Before school you need to develop a rhythm.
The basis of the sound-syllable structure is the ability to clap the rhythm. We speak in words, syllables, sentences - linearly. And we write linearly. If a child has poor rhythm, then in oral speech there is a violation of the sound-syllable structure, and in writing there are omissions and rearrangements. Slap different rhythms, practice different types of timing!
And the teacher says - program
– You have said many times that today the pace of the school curriculum is faster than the development of the child. It’s even more difficult for a child with speech therapy problems. And if the teacher doesn’t understand this... What to do? Transfer to another school?
– Transferring to another school does not seem very desirable to me. Any changes in schools or classes in childhood are imprinted for life. At the previous school there was a team, for some reason they did not accept the child, or the teacher did not accept. The child has come to a new home, and again must assert himself, show himself, and find friends. This is not an easy process.
It’s good if a smart teacher helps the child, surrounds him with attention and says: “This is Masha. Masha can do this, and let’s accept her into our team.”
As for the pace. Yes, now everything is at an accelerated pace - both in life and at school. Such a speed that it seems that they no longer teach at all, but only the teacher gives a lecture and gives an assignment to the parent.
Because of the imbalance of demands, emotional tension increases both at school and at home: come on, come on with the pace, come on, come on with the quality. But at a high pace, the quality of a fledgling skill inevitably suffers. If you write well, the pace slows down. The pace increases only when the skill is formed, and then the quality improves. These are sequentially cumulative things. The imbalance is leveled out. Thus, to develop reading skills, two stages are necessary: technique and understanding. In the early stages, attention comes first, and only then understanding. For an experienced reader (this is everyone who already has fluent reading), the processes change places.
In many schools there is only pace, pace, pace - read stress, stress, stress, because the basic skills have not yet been mastered, but the acceleration has begun. And on all fronts. That is, it is no longer necessary to do something about dysgraphia, but in general to change the approach to life and learning. Stress is already a change in the quality of life. So we hear from all sides: “What do you want? Such a life".
Let's rely on the word "life" and not on the word "pace".
Let's still live and get satisfaction, including from learning. Otherwise, many will remember school as a bad dream. And parents are in a hurry for years, if only this school would “pass” faster. Children do not have time to learn what is not possible. They begin to be cunning, do not understand or misunderstand the task, but at the same time they say - I understand. The situation of failure is growing like a snowball. We must remember that any question a teacher asks is always stressful. The child is always in a testing situation. And then tests are added - a whole lesson filled with stress.
Children pay with their health, persistent reluctance to learn, even refusal, irritation increases, and aggression may appear. Therefore, it is better to prepare your child for school in advance. I will tell you a little later about how to prepare your child for school.
But what to do if speech therapy problems are added? The most common complaint to me is: he reads poorly, slowly. I'm starting to watch the baby. Everything is fine. Yes, he reads syllables, sometimes a syllable + a word, he understands everything. But he already hates the process.
"What do not you like? - Slowly. Anya is already fluent. - And what? You have Vanya, not Anya. He has his own pace of development, physical and psychological readiness, maturity in the end. HE READS AND UNDERSTANDS - this is the main thing. The pace will increase. “And the teacher says it’s a program.”
This is where my arguments end. The teacher, it turns out, “drives” the program, and does not teach a specific child. And the main thing in both words, “student” and “teacher” is teaching.
How to understand that a student needs a speech therapist
– Why does a schoolchild need a speech therapist? You can often hear that just to “tighten up” some sounds, to adjust speech – is this true?
– A school speech therapist, of course, in the first grade can improve a little more on what preschool speech therapists did not have time to do: automate sounds or conduct classes on speech development, especially for those children who had complex speech disorders before school, but the child still -I was finally able to go to secondary school.
But the main thing is that a school speech therapist comes when you need to start solving problems associated with the lack of development of basic school skills: reading, writing, mathematics. Accordingly, the terms dysgraphia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, or with the prefix “a” - absence: agraphia, alexia, acalculia appear. That is, the child cannot learn to read, or write, or count, or experiences significant difficulties in developing these skills.
Somewhere towards the end of the second grade, depending on the program, maybe a little earlier, another feature appears - children do not master the skill of writing. A new disorder appears - dysorthography. All school problems of this nature are solved by a speech therapist.
There is also the term “hyperlexia,” but it is used for children with autism, that is, it is not entirely about reading and its impairment. We are talking about children who read mechanically, without understanding the meaning of what they read, reading for the sake of reading the text. But phenomenologically, this is not a reading problem, and we need to work with the characteristics of autism. Learn to translate what you read into spoken language.
– How can a parent understand that his child needs a speech therapist?
– So-called speech therapy, specific errors should appear on the letter. When a child is just mastering the skill of writing, spelling rules do not appear immediately. At first, children write as they hear, relying on their hearing, this is how the phonetic principle of writing is implemented: all sounds are in a strong position and are not difficult to translate into writing.
And if a child has so-called speech therapy difficulties, then specific errors appear immediately and even in a strong position. For example, a child writes the word “house” as “bom” (“the tail” of the letter in the wrong direction), “tom” (deafens), “dm” (misses a vowel), “domm” (extra elements), “do” ( does not add) and so on - everything that concerns the image of a letter, graphics and the sequence of writing letters, syllables in a word, and words in a sentence.
Or when copying and dictating, the child misses letters, syllables, and words. About the same thing happens with reading: errors in the image of letters in strong positions, omissions - he sees, but reads incorrectly.
These are specific violations. That’s why the name is “disgrapho”; it tells us about a partial violation of graphics. If such a mistake is isolated, it’s not a big deal. Any person, when learning to write, makes some mistakes, but they go away over time.
If there are a lot of such errors, then we talk about frequency. They are found in all subjects, not just Russian and mathematics. A persistent mistake is a mistake that is repeated from year to year and does not go away on its own, and sometimes is fixed for life and occurs even in an adult.
As soon as a parent or teacher notices that there are a lot of mistakes, they are not related to any spelling rule, but seem to look ridiculous, they are often interpreted as errors of inattention, then you need to contact a speech therapist.
And you can say to the specialist: “You know, we have been doing similar tasks for a long time, training, but the child continues to confuse such and such letters and not hear such and such sounds.”
– What can a speech therapist do?
– I always start a consultation not with a conversation with the parents, but with the child. I have several questions that immediately clarify the situation, what kind of child is in front of me and how to build interaction with him. I usually ask parents questions later, without the child.
The first consultation always consists of two stages. First, the child must read and write, together with the speech therapist, those texts that correspond to the age and school curriculum. This is necessary to assess the range of problems in writing and reading. The parent should know which textbooks (what program) the child is studying from, bring workbooks, or better yet, tests with the largest number of errors, so that the problem becomes immediately clear to the specialist.
Secondly, you need to look at the development of speech and what age it corresponds to. There are things that are connected not only “with the letter”, but in general with the language as a whole, including agrammatisms when writing expositions and essays. Usually this problem extends from the preschool period and is associated with general underdevelopment of speech.
Sometimes parents do not notice problems, or they have worked with a speech therapist for so long before school that they believe that all speech problems have been solved. Then the teacher should suggest that you need to go to a speech therapist.
When I just started working as a speech therapist at school, the teachers greeted me like this: “How wonderful, a speech therapist has come to us! Will you play sounds for the children?” I had to give a very short lecture about what speech therapy mistakes children make when writing and what a school speech therapist does. The teachers agreed: “Yes, yes, yes, they make such mistakes. Now we have an ally to help us!”
Over time, everything changed. Now not only the teacher, but also the parent knows about school problems and knows the terminology: “You know, we have dysgraphia.”
Is it just dysgraphia? You still need to “grow into” it, it must also be formed. Some parents complain that the child writes slowly and clumsily, gets tired, has headaches, does not have time to cope with the amount of given material, takes a long time to do homework, is easily distracted, etc. Here it is already necessary to say that the speech therapist is obliged to work in tandem with a neurologist.
