In recent years, statistics have presented us with disappointing facts. According to her, modern children and adolescents get sick more and more often. Moreover, this problem takes place not only in connection with physical abnormalities. The number of inadequate mental reactions shown by children is growing. This causes concern not only of parents, but also of teachers, because the education system certainly bears a part of the responsibility for maintaining the health of the growing generation. That is why in modern schools and kindergartens the use of health-saving technologies is practiced.
What it is?
Health-saving technologies in education are understood as a complex of conditions, methods and techniques that contribute to the maximum preservation and strengthening of not only the physical, but also the moral as well as spiritual health of the subjects of any educational process.
Their main task is to create conditions that will not injure the psyche and the body of the child. At the same time, they will allow the younger generation to be given knowledge about human health and how to preserve it.
Actual problem of our time
The greatest treasure for a person is his health. But by it we mean not only the absence of disease, but also psychological, social and physical harmony, calm and friendly relations with nature, with people and with ourselves.
That is why the education system pays so much attention to the health of the younger generation. The main task of teachers in this case is to preserve the physical and mental qualities of students, their optimal performance, as well as social activity both at school and at home.
Education in the lives of children is one of the most significant factors in terms of its impact and duration. For example, students spend more than 70% of the time in the walls of an educational institution. Moreover, this time coincides with the active period of development and growth of the child, when his body is most sensitive to various environmental factors.
Based on the data of studies conducted at school, many children suffer from a deterioration in their health during the period of study. Moreover, its performance is reduced by 4-5 times. At the same time, an increase in the occurrence of chronic diseases, functional abnormalities and disorders in physical development was noted. Indicators characterizing the health status of students are further exacerbated in the process of their education at school. So, if among the elementary school students there is a little less than 5%, then among high school students there are already only 3%.
Examining schoolchildren, pediatricians noted a high prevalence of myopia, impaired posture, a tendency to colds and neurotic disorders. Such pathologies even got their common name. They began to call them "school diseases." Moreover, today these ailments continue to be widespread. And all this, despite the fact that in modern school in recent years there has been a significant transformation of the material base. This necessitates the creation in the educational institution of a sparing environment that takes into account the difficulties students have and assumes qualified pedagogical support. The need for it also arises in connection with the intensification of the learning process, which uses new forms and technologies, leading to significant stress on children.
It is worth noting that the health problem of the younger generation has acquired social significance in recent years. The causes of many diseases are factors such as poor ecology, the acquisition of bad habits by children and unemployment of parents. All these points significantly reduce the level of student activity during the educational process.
Classification
As you can see, modern health-saving technologies are a fairly broad concept. That is why they can be classified according to various criteria. However, only a few of them are most relevant in practical application. One of the main features of health-saving educational technologies is subjective activity. Based on this, allocate:
- Extra subject technology. When applying them, the student may not suspect that the teacher is currently taking care of his health.
- Technologies involving the use of a passive position.
- Use an active position.
What health-saving educational technologies will be most effective during the lesson? At first glance, an active position should have an obvious advantage in pedagogical practice. Nevertheless, the teacher needs to develop a methodology for constructing a lesson in which all three types of health-saving technologies described above are applied. It should be borne in mind that the student’s active position can be formed under the influence of not only positive, but also negative factors, such as, for example, false values that are imposed by the media, especially family education or ordinary human laziness. All this also leads to the fact that the child is reluctant to accept the position of the teacher.
In addition, sanitary-hygienic and pedagogical measures themselves are distinguished from the entire volume of health-saving technologies in working with children. What are they? The hygienic component of health-saving technologies in classes with children provides for the inclusion of such components:
- the conditions created in the room in the form of good lighting, temperature, ventilation, cleaning mode;
- organization of a balanced diet;
- the right choice of furniture and other items used in the classroom;
- organization of lessons based on their compliance with sanitary standards, as well as the age characteristics of students;
- creation of a student’s workplace taking into account his health status.
There are also three groups of health-saving technologies. Among them:
- Techniques to preserve and stimulate the health of the child. These include dynamic pauses and rhythmoplasty, sports and outdoor games, aesthetic activities, relaxation, gymnastics for the eyes, as well as respiratory, corrective, orthopedic.
- Technologies for healthy lifestyle education. This is a point and ordinary self-massage, health talks and communicative games.
- Correction technology. They include such methods: art therapy, fairy tale therapy, exposure to music, color, psycho-gymnastics, speech therapy and phonetic rhythm.
The above groups of health-saving technologies include:
- Technologies of an organizational and pedagogical nature that determine the very structure of the lesson and contribute to preventing the state of physical inactivity and overwork.
- Technologies of the psychological and pedagogical plan related to the work of the teacher in the lesson and its impact on students.
- Technologies of educational nature, which include programs to develop a culture of health in children and their motivation for maintaining healthy lifestyles.
It is worth noting that the implementation of health-saving technologies in most schools in our country is quite successful. Teachers regularly monitor the temperature regime of the class and the state of its illumination. School canteens and buffets do not have products that are harmful to children's health. In addition, when scheduling lessons, the administration of an educational institution takes into account recommendations for the rational organization of the school day. And, of course, teachers will not put a child with poor eyesight on one of the rear desks, and a high school student at a low table. Widespread use in this area is also the activation of the student’s position. Children are constantly involved in landscaping and cleaning.
It is worth noting that from the point of view of the conditions of health-saving technologies, too widespread use of computers in the educational process cannot be approved. As you know, when reading from a PC screen, vision can suffer more than when working with paper.
Pedagogical techniques
When using health-saving technologies, the teacher builds the lesson so that the educational process has a minimal load on the child’s body and its psyche. Moreover, he manages to achieve the most effective assimilation of the material studied.
The simplest, but at the same time effective teaching methods are:
- constant change of students' activities (five or more times during the lesson);
- rational distribution of the load on children, when the most intense work falls in the middle of the school hour;
- the use of role-playing and playful forms of work that unobtrusively make children move;
- creating a friendly atmosphere of cooperation in which children are given the right to express their opinion and ask questions;
- maintaining a favorable emotional atmosphere, when in the lesson the teacher relaxes the students a bit by saying a joke or a literary quote.
Of particular importance is the use of health-saving technologies in elementary school. After all, children in the first grades do not yet have sufficient skills for concentration. With younger preschoolers, it is recommended to conduct physical education lessons in classes, which include exercises for vision and breathing exercises. At this age, children are pretty good at such events and need them more.
It is also worth noting that the use of health-saving technologies is also a concern for the teacher. The use of such techniques allows you to protect it from stress and create comfortable working conditions.
A teacher who is ready to use health-saving technologies in his work, at the initial stage of this process should solve the following tasks:
- Objectively assess their own strengths and weaknesses that are associated with professional activities, and, if necessary, draw up a plan for self-correction and its implementation.
- Improve your own qualifications in health-saving technologies.
- To conduct an audit of pedagogical techniques and techniques that he uses in his work, in the light of the impact they have on the health of students.
- To purposefully implement health-saving educational technologies during classes with children, tracking the results obtained by them using objective assessment methods and their own feelings.
- To take an active part in the formation in the school or in the DOE, which is the place of his work, of an educational health-saving environment, interacting with all members of the teaching staff, students and their parents.
All these measures will help to solve the problem facing the teacher.
Health Saving Technologies for Learning English
Protect students and teachers from excessive loads and stresses is necessary throughout the educational process. However, the use of health-saving technologies in English classes is of paramount importance. This subject is quite serious and complex. During its development, children learn to communicate in an unfamiliar language. At the same time, they need to learn new material for them, namely grammatical forms and lexical units, while acquiring pronunciation skills.
The need to use health-saving technologies in English classes is caused by the fact that children have to read and write, speak and memorize a lot, as well as listen and analyze the information received. That is why the teacher needs to minimize the load when acquiring knowledge.
Lesson building
How are health-saving technologies used in English classes? The lesson, during which a similar technique finds its application, is built taking into account the need for self-development of children, as well as their need for imitation and gaining experience.
In order to avoid overload and fatigue of students, the teacher needs to build a lesson based on the dynamics of children's attention. In this case, the teacher will need to take into account the time required to complete each of the tasks proposed by him, while alternating the types of work.
The use of health-saving technologies in English lessons involves the use of various elements that contribute to the development of memory, mental operations with the simultaneous relaxation of students. These include:
- rational distribution of study time with individual dosing of workload volumes;
- the periodic change of varieties of work, providing for the alternation of independent fulfillment of tasks, reading, writing, listening, answering questions, etc .;
- performance of various tasks (test, for regrouping, for searching and recognizing errors, etc.);
- conducting on the basis of calendar and thematic planning of control tests, as well as compliance with the volume of tests offered to students;
- physical exercises and game breaks, visual gymnastics and emotional discharge;
- monitoring students' posture, as well as controlling the change in their posture in accordance with the type of educational activity.
Health-saving technology
Solving the problem of reducing the load on students, the teacher should rely on modern teaching aids. They will allow you to most effectively solve the tasks assigned to education. New generation textbooks, especially those created for high school students, contain health-related material. These topics, among other things, are an excellent tool to help develop language learning skills. Such material will help children learn a lot of new, useful and interesting, allowing them to stay healthy. For example, stories about bad and healthy habits, about how people in other countries of the world maintain their physical shape, about diet, nutrition, etc.
Positive aspects of the application of the system
Based on the existing experience of health-saving technologies, their use in combination with pedagogical protective regimes plays a rather large role in the life of each student. Children more successfully and easily master the necessary knowledge and overcome difficulties. This allows them to achieve those goals that are part of the learning task.
Children acquire stress-free life skills. They strengthen and maintain their health and learn to value someone else's. Such a pedagogical approach does not create additional stresses on the nervous system, while contributing to the creative development of children.
Relaxation
The use of health-saving technologies in English classes allows you to provide the most favorable and comfortable atmosphere in the classroom. At the same time, the teacher seeks to create a positive emotional mood in children towards the topic being studied. All this allows you to remove the negative effects exerted by various factors on the student's body.
The teacher’s task is to create a positive attitude to the subject and increase interest, as well as motivating students. A very important point in this case is the lack of fear and a sense of fear of English in children. Unfortunately, this can often be observed in elementary grades, as well as in the study of this subject by kids in preschool educational institutions.
That is why, as one of the elements of health-saving technologies, the teacher uses relaxation in English lessons. Its goal is to relieve mental stress, provide children with a little rest and arouse positive emotions. All this will improve the development of the material.
What types of relaxation can be applied when using health-saving technologies? This includes various kinds of movements, pair or group work, role-playing games, dancing, singing, dialogue with fairy tale characters, staging small scenes, watching cartoons.
Relaxation is a state of peace and relaxation that occurs when stress is relieved. This discharge when using health-saving technologies in the classroom is recommended for middle and high school students. For this, for example, a teacher can conduct exercises with quiet, calm music.
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When learning English, the teacher uses games that allow children to relax and evoke positive emotions, pleasure and ease. It can be various competitions and contests, as well as pantomimes. When using role-playing games, students recreate a variety of situations that can occur in real life.
When applying health-saving technologies in an elementary school or in a preschool educational institution, where children are just starting to learn the alphabet, the teacher can offer the child to draw a letter in the air, performing the necessary head movements. All others must guess what was in the virtual drawing.
Favorable soil for the development of motor activity of children, which will contribute to improving the health of students and their effective assimilation of material when learning English, is created during outdoor games. They will allow you to learn new colors, names of objects, etc.
The level of fatigue of children is perfectly reduced during finger games. They allow you to communicate with the child using tactile sensations. For a baby who is just starting to learn a foreign language, this approach will be very important for the successful acquisition of knowledge.
Songs
They must also be used in English classes. At the same time, not only kids can sing songs. A similar technique is used at all levels of education as a way of influencing the emotions and feelings of the student. Songs help to better memorize vocabulary, practice grammatical structures, work out phonetics, etc. In addition, they will allow the child to relax, interrupting the routine of learning activities for a while. Singing is a kind of relaxation. That is why the teacher should apply it in the middle or at the end of the lesson, when the children begin to get tired and they need to restore working capacity. In addition, the song is very good for health. It helps to activate the function of the respiratory and vocal apparatus, develops memory and ear for music, while increasing interest in the subject under study.
When using a song, the teacher must first let the students listen to it. After that, they will have to repeat each line after the teacher, paying attention to the pronunciation.
The song can be used as an introduction to a new topic. To do this, you need to select a melody with the appropriate text. In addition, the song can become a wonderful additional material that allows you to better learn the features of the American and English lifestyle.
The teacher can use such material:
- when repeating completed structures;
- to expand the vocabulary of students;
- introductions in the context of new structures;
- repetition of vocabulary;
- pronunciation skills training.
A positive factor in engaging a song when learning English is the use of modern words in its text. This allows children to get acquainted with grammatical constructions and vocabulary, which can often be found in the speech of their foreign peers.
Gymnastics
Their conduct to restore the health of children is desirable in any lesson. For various kinds of exercises, the teacher can pick up any additional material in the form of songs, poems, tongue twisters, rhymes and proverbs in English. Their children will learn with pleasure and at the same time remember everything easily and naturally.
A similar physical training session is carried out with the schoolchildren repeatedly repeating words, sentences or speech cliches. At the same time, children clap their hands, drown their feet, make turns with their torso, run or walk on the spot, etc. If such a physical training session is accompanied by music, this will make the event more interesting, rich and increase the emotional state of students, while simultaneously contributing to this the development of coordination, emotionality and ease of movement.
Sometimes teachers are reluctant to conduct such an event. They do not want to interrupt the lesson, which presents complex and rich material. Nevertheless, physical education is a necessity for schoolchildren, because a lesson for each of them is a work that takes place in conditions of almost complete immobility. And it is very difficult for energetic children. And if during the breaks their eyes burn, then after a call at their desks, students most often sit down with an extinguished look, whose faces come off a smile. In this case, a change in posture occurs, the head hangs and the shoulders drop. That is why it is so important for the teacher to arrange pauses, which will serve as an excellent discharge for students, inviting children to perform simple exercises for them.
The teacher needs to be creative with physical education, trying to diversify this event as much as possible. So, the lesson will be able to revive the game (at the blackboard, in groups or in pairs), during which the children will move around the class. It is also recommended that children be given a physical education session. This will allow them to continue to use a certain set of exercises not only in the classroom, but also at home.
When is it better to include physical education in the lesson? The time for its implementation is chosen by the teacher himself. As a rule, after the start of the lesson, approximately 20 minutes should elapse. It is desirable for the teacher to determine the development in children of the first phase of mental fatigue, when students begin to show motor anxiety. Conducting physical education will increase the mental performance of children and relieve their static muscle tension.
Breathing exercises
Such exercises also play an important role in the application of health-saving technologies.
With a deepening of breathing during respiratory gymnastics, an increase in the excitability of the cerebral cortex occurs, which makes it possible to increase the activity of children.
Emotional discharge
To relieve fatigue and mental stress, the teacher is encouraged to pronounce cheerful quatrains and sayings to children, as well as show them instructive or humorous pictures. Another irritant to relieve tension is laughter. For his appearance, the teacher can introduce children to humorous stories in English.