Preparing a first-grader for school

Gold school bell with school supplies on table on bright background

Preparing for school. What a future first-grader should be able to do

First class is an important and difficult stage in a child’s life. “First-graders should be cooked like astronauts,” the parents joked. Indeed, the requirements have increased. The first grade program implies that the child has already mastered certain skills.

The period of adaptation to school will be easier if you prepare him for the first grade. Parents can do this on their own, doing exercises to develop each skill. To make the task easier, use notebooks “Kumon. Let’s get ready for school. Specialists have thought of exercises for you.

The training is structured in the form of playful tasks. You don’t have to make your baby learn.

We have put together a list of skills that a first-grader needs and matched them with notebooks that will help develop each of them.

Schoolboy Skills

  1. Thinking

Tasks to test skill development:

  • determine if it’s unnecessary;
  • categorize the items;
  • find the differences;
  • put together a figure from the pieces;
  • build a given figure out of cubes;
  • solve a logical problem. For example, my name is Irina. My brother has only one sister. What is the name of my brother’s sister?

For a child to learn to perform such tasks, it is necessary to develop logical and spatial thinking. The tasks of passing mazes, connection by points, coloring by numbers will help. Necessary tasks are collected in notebooks.

How to make skills training effective

  1. Attention .
    At the beginning of training, an avalanche of knowledge and new vivid impressions falls on the first-grader. Here the teacher tells a fascinating fairy tale “Journey to the Land of Mathematics”, a number of 20 classmates, each of whom you want to see, and a very persistent bird knocks on the window.

An adult person can easily switch from one to another and have no difficulty in perceiving information. The attention of first graders is still very narrow. Children are not able to simultaneously look at a picture and ponder the teacher’s story about the artist who drew it.

Therefore, it is important even before school to teach your child to properly distribute the attention, to focus on the main thing.

This skill from the list of first-graders train almost all notebooks methods KUMON.

  1. Memory
    Parents of younger students often say, “My child can’t learn the poem/memorize the multiplication table/forget to write the assignments in the diary. And it is usually added: “He has a bad memory.” Such problems can be avoided if the memory is trained.

How do I check the memory development level? A first-grader should memorize pictures and figures. Play a game with him – print out different simple pictures and show them. He will look at them for 30 seconds, then draw what he remembers. The first grader should be able to remember pictures, symbols and pieces (up to 10 pieces).

Name 10 words. Let him do it again.

Tell the kid a short story. The story “Good Duck” by Vladimir Suteyev or “The Hen” by Eugene Charushin will do.

If it is difficult to reproduce the story from the first time the child, first ask him questions about the text. In the case of “Good Duck” – who went for a walk, what ducklings know how to do, why the duck was called good. Ask again to retell the story. If necessary, repeat it yourself before doing so.

For memory training was diverse and did not bore the future first-grader, use a notebook.

  1. Motors .
    Difficulties in writing for first graders arise not from the complexity of writing the elements of letters and numbers, but from unpreparedness.

The future first-grader needs to be able to write:

  • to hold a pen, pencil and brush correctly;
  • to draw straight lines;
  • make neat applications (cut and glue);
  • copy the spelling of printed letters;
  • sculpt figures and compositions.

Develop fine motor skills of hands – string beads on a thread, fasten buttons, do handicrafts from plasticine and paint pictures. Coloring must be present in the life of the child necessarily. He will learn to hold a pencil, control the power of pressure, to control the hand.

  • Study every day. Regularity is the key to success.
  • Spend no more than 20 minutes a day on it.
  • Complicate the tasks gradually.
  • Praise the “student.”

It’s the only way you’ll make a future first-grader want to study. And the preparation for school will be quick and easy.