Developing activities in kindergarten play a particularly important role for children whose parents, for various reasons, cannot organize regular education of preschoolers at home. In such families, great hopes are placed on educators, and not by chance. The teacher must not only be able to ensure the safe stay of the child in the kindergarten, but also take care of his personal and spiritual growth, how he is progressing on his path of preparation for school.
The key to the success of any activity is a professional and conscious approach. The teacher should not only be passionate about the lessons, but also be well aware of their purpose. Reading fiction provides great opportunities for communication with children and involves solving a variety of problems. This article discusses the goals of reading prose and poetry texts for preschoolers from the point of view of setting various pedagogical tasks.
Orienting goal
A person in his life has to gain experience from a variety of sources, and the texts of the mostdifferent genres play an important role in this. The initial steps in this direction are already taken by the parents in the very first years of the child's life, then the younger group solves its problems. Reading fiction becomes especially necessary when a child moves into the middle group. As a rule, if this period is poor in reading, it is quite difficult to make up for it in the future.
During this period, one of the most important purposes of reading is orienting. From the works, children draw the missing elementary knowledge about the everyday side of life, about the relationships and stages of people's lives, about their duties towards each other.
The value of reading already at this age is hard to overestimate. Basically, the life of children is rather monotonous and poor in impressions, closed in a certain circle. The child has few opportunities to escape from a limited set of sources of knowledge about life, and literary texts largely compensate for this. Of course, the achievement of this goal is the more successful, the more professionally the teacher approaches it. He must calculate what needs to be paid special attention to, what exactly to comment on from the point of view of children gaining new life experience. However, even without comments, reading will be far from useless, as the child will be able to ask questions, the answers to which he will then look for on his own.
Development of emotions
A person is made human by the ability to sympathize, understand and predict someone else's state, the ability to "read" the feelings and thoughts of another. Any competent psychiatrist will confirm that these are by no means just high words, but indicatorsnormally developing child. These abilities suffer or are not expressed in orphans, as well as in children with an autism spectrum disorder. Lagging ability to sympathize, a pronouncedly poor emotional sphere - these are objectively abnormal (in the medical sense of the word) manifestations. For many children, this is evidence of pedagogical neglect.
Reading fiction as a child can develop these abilities, allowing for more complex emotions from books of a different level in the future.
Educational goal
Of course, reading fiction in the middle group plays a pronounced educational role. With the help of a book and a teacher, a child learns or confirms his ideas about what is good and what is bad, easily and uncritically perceives stereotypes of behavior. At this age, children begin to differ quite noticeably from each other, depending on what books they are brought up on. Perceiving fiction directly and naively, preschoolers try on themselves and their lives the behavior of heroes. In the event that ideas about normal human actions are instilled in him both in kindergarten and at home, he receives invaluable life experience that prepares him for life in society.
However primitive and self-evident these ideas may seem to the educator and parents, they should not be deceived that they will be learned by themselves.
Educational purpose
The younger kindergarten group does not focus on educational goals, the middle group begins to focus on them. Reading fiction, in addition to its self-evident entertainment function, should have as its goal the intellectual development of the child.
The perception of the plot itself is a colossal intellectual task for kids of this age. The teacher should monitor how children grasp logical and - especially - causal relationships.
In the event that the teacher notices the inability of individual children to understand the meaning of the text, this should be an occasion to understand the reasons. If in some cases this may be evidence of pedagogical neglect and some lag due to insufficient attention to the child from the parents, then in other cases it may be a signal of the developmental features of the baby. If a child who is surrounded by the attention and care of parents is not able, unlike others, to answer elementary questions on cause-and-effect relationships, this may be a reason to contact a psychologist.
Ensuring quality input
Reading fiction in the middle group, as at any other age, is the provision of high-quality speech input (material for analysis, sample of speech). One of the basic conditions for the successful acquisition and comprehension of a language by a child is how rich speech he hears around him and how personally it is addressed to him.
Textsprofessional authors are excellent material for speech samples. The child hears and perceives new words, constructions, learns to structure the statement, learns clichés and patterns of speech, learns to recognize different styles.
Educators and parents should pay special attention to what words the child does not understand, learn to explain them to the baby in a language that is accessible to him. As a rule, during such conversations, gaps in the child's worldview, his erroneous ideas, are revealed.
One of the main tasks of reading at this age is to teach the child to respond to unfamiliar words: ask about their meaning, try to comprehend their meaning, recognize and understand them in other texts and then apply them in their speech.
Preparing for the perception of texts of another level
We must not forget that the child is ahead of the senior and preparatory group. Reading fiction should dynamically prepare him for the tasks that are set at this age. The older the child becomes, the more serious the problems that he may encounter in his education, the more tangible are the omissions that occurred in the initial stages of his life.
At school, the basic teaching method is learning through text (spoken by the teacher or read in a textbook). The ability to perceive the text as such and the ability to extract information from it "artificially" is formed for a rather long and difficult time, with great resistance on the part of the child.
Unobtrusively andthis ability is easily developed in those children who are accustomed to listening to literary texts from childhood. Many parents who are late with the formation of this ability and begin to read to children only before school note that children either perceive the text with great tension, or sabotage such activities, or simply fall asleep. This is quite understandable, since it is quite difficult to perceive the text without a habit. Literature readable and perceived by ear should “grow” with the child and begin not with voluminous stories and textbooks, but with short poems and short stories, adapted fairy tales.
Development of imagination and spiritual base
Reading fiction in preschool, of course, plays an important role in the development of the imagination. A common misconception among many parents - and educators as well - is the idea of this ability as optional. Meanwhile, this is one of the basic (if not primary) intellectual and spiritual functions. Suffice it to say that the ability to imagine and imagine is a diagnostic criterion for identifying a number of mental disorders, including clinical mental retardation and autism. Excessive development of one's own fantasies and the inability to focus on the artistic world created by another person can be a signal of the development of schizophrenia.
The ability to imagine is the key to the development of abstract, independent thinking, the ability to solve problems not according to the model, to find answers to everyday questions and life difficulties,handle new responsibilities. The development of the imagination enables a person to be independent both in the elementary and in the spiritual - in personal relationships, political views, aesthetic tastes and religious beliefs. A person with a critically ill-developed imagination will always differ from others in a statement, helplessness and dependence.
Develop communication
The development of social skills and communication capabilities is one of the most important reasons (besides, of course, purely domestic) why a child should attend kindergarten. Reading fiction is a great opportunity to develop communication skills. Discussing with children what they have read gives them the opportunity not only to listen, but to express themselves. One of the signals that the reading is successful is the flow of lively and direct reactions to what is read, questions of a very different nature. Discussing a work by children among themselves on their own initiative is the “aerobatics” of the educator.
A book as a reason for a child to talk with an adult or with other children raises him to a new stage of mental and intellectual development.
Stereotyping
Reading fiction in the middle group, especially well-organized, forms a number of stereotypes of behavior. In the future, they will certainly affect the life of the child in general and his education in particular. These stereotypes include the following:
- Reading books is a must and mundaneoccupation.
- There is always something incomprehensible in books, and this incomprehensibility should ideally be explained in accessible ways.
- Adult is a source of knowledge. (This will also be very important when the current Kindergartener becomes an adult in the future.)
- Missing knowledge about the world can be drawn from books.
- You can look for the source of emotions in books.
Reading fiction in the middle group does not have to solve all these problems at once. The teacher can make different accents each time. Thus, a work, the educational purpose of which is clearly expressed in the content itself, can be especially carefully commented on from the point of view of new words. Conversely, a light and easily accessible book can be discussed, for example, in terms of the state of the characters. In general, of course, the success of such classes is determined by the talent of the works, on the one hand, and the professionalism and personal interest of the teacher, on the other.
