Developing classes in kindergarten play a particularly important role for children whose parents, for various reasons, cannot organize regular training for preschool children at home. In such families, great hopes are placed on educators, and not by chance. The teacher must not only be able to ensure a safe stay of the child in the kindergarten, but also take care of his personal and spiritual growth, about how he is moving forward on his path to school preparation.
The key to success of any occupation is a professional and informed approach. The teacher should not only be passionate about the lessons, but also well aware of their purpose. Reading fiction provides great opportunities for communicating with children and involves solving a variety of problems. This article discusses the goals of reading prosaic and poetic texts for preschoolers in terms of setting different pedagogical tasks.
Orientation Goal
A person in his life has to gain experience from a variety of sources, and texts of various genres play a significant role in this. Initial steps in this direction are already taken by parents in the very first years of a child’s life, then the younger group solves their tasks. Reading fiction becomes especially necessary when moving a child to the middle group. As a rule, if this period is poor in reading, it is rather difficult to fill up in the future.
During this period, one of the most important goals of reading is orienting. From the works of children, they draw on the lack of elementary knowledge about the everyday side of life, about the relationships and stages of people's lives, about their responsibilities to each other.
The importance of reading already at this age is difficult to overestimate. Basically, the lives of children are pretty 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 compensate for this in many ways. Of course, the achievement of this goal is the more successful the more professionally the teacher approaches him. He should consider what special attention should be paid to what exactly to comment on from the point of view of children getting a new life experience. However, even without commenting, reading will be far from useless, as the child will be able to ask questions, the answers to which will then be searched on their own.
Development of emotions
Man is made man by the ability to compassion, 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 not just high words, but indicators of a normally developing child. These abilities suffer or are not expressed in orphans, as well as in children with autism spectrum disorder . The lag of compassion, a markedly 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 in childhood can develop these abilities, provide the opportunity to receive 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. Using 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 quite noticeably differ from each other, depending on what books they are brought up on. Perceiving fiction directly and naively, preschoolers try on the behavior of heroes on themselves and their lives. In that case, both in kindergarten and at home, ideas about normal human actions are instilled in him, he receives invaluable life experience, which prepares him for life in society.
No matter how primitive and self-evident these educators and parents may seem, they should not be mistaken that they will assimilate themselves.
Educational purpose
The younger group of the kindergarten does not focus on educational goals, the middle group begins to focus on them. Reading fiction, in addition to the self-evident entertainment function, should have as its goal the intellectual development of the child.
The perception of the plot in itself is a colossal intellectual task for kids of this age. The educator needs to keep an eye on how children capture 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 in order 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 this may be a signal of the developmental features of the baby. If the child, who is surrounded by the attention and care of the parents, is not able, unlike others, to answer basic questions about cause and effect relationships, this may be an occasion to contact a psychologist.
Quality Assurance
Reading fiction in the middle group, as at any other age, is the provision of high-quality speech input (material for analysis, a sample of speech). One of the basic conditions for a child to successfully learn and understand a language is how rich he hears around him and how personally he speaks to him.
Texts by professional authors are excellent material for speech patterns. The child hears and perceives new words, constructions, learns to structure the utterance, learns stamps and patterns of speech, learns to recognize different styles.
Carers and parents should pay special attention to what words the child does not understand, learn to explain them to the baby in a language accessible to him. As a rule, such conversations reveal gaps in the worldview of the child, his erroneous ideas.
One of the main tasks of reading at this age is to teach a 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.
Preparation for the perception of texts of a different level
We must not forget that in front of the child is an older 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 are the problems that he may encounter in his education, the more noticeable are the omissions that occurred in the initial stages of his life.
At school, the basic method of teaching is learning through text (spoken by a teacher or read in a textbook). The ability to perceive the text as such and the ability to extract information from it “artificially” takes quite a long time and is difficult, with great resistance from the child.
Unobtrusively and easily, this ability develops in those children who are used to listening to literary texts from childhood. Many parents who are late in forming this ability and begin to read to children just before school, note that children are either very sensitive to the text, sabotaging such activities, or simply falling asleep. This is understandable, as perceiving a text without a habit is quite difficult. Literature read and heard must “grow” with the child and begin not with voluminous novels and textbooks, but with short poems and short stories adapted from fairy tales.
The development of imagination and spiritual base
Reading fiction in a preschool educational institution, of course, plays an important role in the development of imagination. A common misconception of many parents - and educators - 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 in identifying a number of mental disorders, including clinical mental retardation and autism. Excessive development of one’s own fantasies and inability to focus on the art world created by another person can be a signal for the development of schizophrenia.
The ability to imagine is the key to the development of abstract, independent thinking, the ability to solve problems not in the model, to find answers to everyday questions and life difficulties, to cope with new responsibilities. The development of 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 be distinguished from others by a statement, helplessness and dependence.
Communication development
The development of social skills and communication capabilities is one of the most important reasons (besides, of course, purely domestic ones) why a child should attend kindergarten. Reading fiction is a great opportunity to develop communication skills. Discussion with the children of the reading 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 has been read, questions of a very different nature. The discussion of the work of children among themselves on their own initiative is the “aerobatics” of the educator.
The book as a reason for a child to talk with an adult or with other children raises him to a new stage in 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. Among these stereotypes are the following:
- Reading books is a compulsory and routine activity.
- There is always something incomprehensible in books, and this incomprehensible should ideally be explained in accessible ways.
- Adult is a source of knowledge. (This will be very important, including when the current kindergartner is in the future as an adult.)
- Missing knowledge about the world can be drawn from books.
- In books you can look for a source of emotions.
Reading fiction in the middle group does not have to solve all these problems at once. The teacher can make different accents every time. Thus, a work whose educational purpose is clearly expressed in the content itself can be especially carefully commented on in terms of new words. Conversely, an easy and vocabulary-accessible book can be discussed, for example, from the side of the character’s state. On the whole, 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.