What is the most important and difficult thing about getting ready for school?

Looking back at each child and knowing his or her difficulties, parents give different answers: “Mine is not good at math. “Mine is sloppy in math. But these are rather peculiarities of a particular child’s perception of learning, they can be corrected. Objectively, the most important and most difficult skill to prepare for school is reading. This has been confirmed by researchers and practitioners alike.

Learning to read is a complex cognitive process associated with the organization of memory, attention, operating with images. Converting them into a verbal-logical form and vice versa, decoding symbols (in the process of reading) into images. Recognizing and manipulating them.

The process is complex, because different information is encoded by different parts of the brain. The reading process involves departments that are responsible for processing sound and visual images, speech centers, short-term and long-term memory.

Learning to read is important because progress in all school subjects depends on reading. Parents feel and understand this and that’s why they try to teach your child to read before school.

If a child develops within normal limits, as a rule, it will not be difficult for him to master the first grade counting and operations with numbers within ten. He encounters counting at the household level and begins to operate with numbers willy-nilly. With a minimum of observation and 1-2 trips a year on vacation or in the countryside to his grandmother, it is not a problem to master the laws of nature.

Writing is mastered by children in first grade. Some elementary school teachers even advise not to teach a child to write before school. In their opinion, it is better if it happens in the classroom. Greater or lesser difficulties can cause notebooks according to the teacher’s requirements, but even with this by the end of the first grade children usually cope. Or the teacher can cope, realizing to which students in the class the general requirements do not apply.

Reading is quite another matter. It can be difficult for a child to learn to read. After all, it will be necessary to master symbolic language, when a combination of abstract signs produces sounds that turn into words, and behind them there are concrete objects, actions, and meanings.