Cognitive processes: perception, attention, imagination, memory, thinking, speech - act as the most important components of any human activity. Therefore, one of the main goals educational work becomes the formation of children's intelligence, and the basis for the development of mental abilities in the younger school age is the purposeful development of cognitive processes.

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"DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES OF JUNIOR SCHOOLCHILDREN"

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Pedagogy should not focus on
yesterday, and for tomorrow's child development"
Vygotsky L.S.

cognitive processes: perception, attention, imagination, memory, thinking, speech- act as the most important components of any human activity. In order to satisfy his needs, communicate, play, study and work, a person must perceive the world, pay attention to certain moments or components of activity, imagine what he needs to do, remember, think, and express judgments. Therefore, without the participation of cognitive processes, human activity is impossible, they act as its integral internal moments. They develop in activities, and are themselves special activities. When starting pedagogical work with children, first of all, you need to understand what is given to the child by nature and what is acquired under the influence of the environment.

The main cognitive process of reflecting reality is perception . Its basis is the work of the human senses. The perception of students in grades 1 and 2 is characterized by weak differentiation. It is necessary to teach them to compare similar objects, to find differences between them. In the development of voluntary perception great importance has a word. If in grades 1-2 the perception of verbal material needs visualization, then in grades 3-4 this is required to a lesser extent. As a result of playing and learning activities, perception turns into an independent activity, into observation.

Another process closely related to perception is imagination students. By the 1st grade, children have elements of arbitrary imagination. In the process of creating mental images, the child relies on the ideas he has. The creation of new images in the mind is due to the expansion of ideas, their transformation and combination.

Attention serves as the basis for the development of other cognitive processes, since, according to K.D. Ushinsky is a “door” through which everything that only enters the soul of a person from the outside world passes” ... There is not a single mental work that would not be carried out without volitional sufficient tension in the form of voluntary attention. The predominant type of attention of younger students remains involuntary. The nature of mental activity is visual-figurative. IN primary school the development of voluntary attention of students. It is closely related to the development of a responsible attitude to learning. The younger student cannot distribute attention between different types of work. He has little attention span. Cannot quickly shift his attention from one object to another.

Reasons for carelessness:

1. Sloth of thought

2. Lack of serious attitude to teaching

3. Increased excitability of the central nervous system

Study of cognitive activity children shows that by the end of elementary school there is a surge in research activity. Reading or observing various phenomena of life, children begin to formulate search questions that they themselves try to find the answer to. This happens because students are trying to understand and comprehend the cause-and-effect relationships and the laws of the occurrence of various events. The exploratory activity of children at the stage of causal thinking is characterized by two qualities: an increase in the independence of mental activity and an increase in the criticality of thinking. These abilities are the basic prerequisites for creativity.

Holding in lower grades regular developmental activities, the inclusion of children in constant search activities significantly humanizes primary education. This approach creates conditions for the development of cognitive interests in children, stimulates the child's desire for reflection and search, makes him feel confident in his abilities, in the capabilities of his intellect. During such classes, students form and develop forms of self-awareness and self-control, the fear of erroneous steps disappears, anxiety and unreasonable anxiety decrease, thereby creating the necessary personal and intellectual prerequisites for the successful flow of the learning process at the following stages.

The development of intellectual abilities is directly related to all major subjects primary education. More intensive development of logical thinking, attention and memory of students helps to better analyze and understand readable texts and the rules studied in the Russian language lessons, to navigate more freely in the laws of the surrounding reality, to effectively use the accumulation of knowledge and skills in mathematics lessons. The formation of spatial imagination and constructive skills among schoolchildren contributes to more effective activities in labor lessons.

One of the means of formation cognitive interest is entertainment. The game puts the student in search conditions, arouses interest in winning, and hence the desire to be fast, collected, resourceful, etc. The student works with interest if he performs a task that is feasible for him.

In modern conditions, the task of the GPA educator is extremely important: to ensure that our children grow up not only as conscious and healthy members of society, but also necessarily, enterprising, thinking, capable of a creative approach to business. Therefore, at present, one of the main goals of educational work is the formation of children's intelligence, and the basis for the development of mental abilities in primary school age is the purposeful development of cognitive mental processes: attention, imagination, perception, memory, thinking. And here they come to the aid of the educatoreducational gamesaimed at developing in children intellectually - creativity: observation, flexibility, ability to analyze, compare, think logically; ability to find dependencies

patterns; the ability to combine, spatial representation and imagination, the ability to foresee the results of their actions; stable attention, well-developed memory.

Educational games:

1. Matching games(provide the ability to create new combinations of existing elements, parts, objects):

tangram

Stick games

Logic tasks

Chess

Puzzle

2. Planning games (form the ability to plan a sequence of actions to achieve a goal):

labyrinths

magic squares

3. Games for the formation of the ability to analyze(provide the ability to combine individual items into a group with a common name, highlight common signs items :)

Find a couple

Find the extra

Puzzles

Continue row

1. Exercise "Let's listen!"

The goal is to develop concentration of attention and hold it for a long time on one subject.

Game procedure.

Leading:

Sat down! Let's hear what's going on outside.

Get ready, listen!

Who heard what? (Children answer at a fast pace)

Let's listen to what's going on in the hallway. Let's listen to what's going on in the classroom. Etc.

Get ready. Listen!

Who heard what?

2. “The whole is a part. Part-whole".

The goal is to develop the ability to analyze, highlight the part and the whole, the development of logical thinking

From the first pair of words, you should determine which rule is in place here: whole-part or part-whole. For the word of the second pair, you need to indicate from the proposed options the one that matches the found rule.

1. Car - wheel; gun - a) shoot b) trigger c) weapon

2. penny - ruble; sleeve - a) sew on b) button c) shirt

3. guitar - string; eye - a) pupil b) head c) nose

4. cherry - bone; cancer - a) claw b) fish c) river

5. page - book; petal - a) bee b) morning c) flower

6. theater - stage; house - a) street b) apartment c) build

7. finger - hand; nail - a) finger b) scissors c) claw

8. shoe - lace; belt - a) trousers b) belt c) yarn

9. mouth - river; mast - a) ship b) sea c) tree

10. shell - turtle; step - a) builder b) stairs c) climb

3 . Thinking exercise

Instruction: “Before you is a column of words (concepts), and next to each of them, in brackets, five words. From these five words, you must choose two words that indicate the essential features of the concept written before the bracket.

Garden - (trees, gardener, dog, fence, earth).

Mouse - (back, cat, eyes, cheese, mousetrap).

River - (coast, fish, fisherman, mud, water).

Lion - (circus, ears, hay, overseer, eyes).

Face - (color, hair, glasses, nose, mustache).

City - (car, building, crowd, streets, cyclist).

Forest - (animals, pines, trees, mushrooms, sky).

Cube - (corners, drawing, side, stone, wood)

Reading - (eyes, book, picture, print, word)

Citizen - (fatherland, craft, advantage, property, right to vote).

Newspaper - (truth, applications, telegrams, paper, editor).

Game - (cards, players, penalties, punishments, rules).

Fairy tale - (sorcerer, fiction, king, utility, creativity).

Labor - (payment, goal, car, beginning, pleasantness).

War - (airplanes, guns, battles, guns, soldiers).

4. Exercise "Remove the excess"

Instructions: choose one extra word from 3 words.

Color:

• orange, kiwi, persimmon
• chicken, lemon, cornflower
• cucumber, carrot, herb
• sugar, wheat, cotton wool.

The form:

• TV, book, wheel
• scarf, watermelon, tent.

Size:

• hippopotamus, ant, elephant
• house, pencil, spoon.

Material:

• jar, saucepan, glass
• album, notebook, pen

Taste:

• candy, potatoes, jam
• cake, herring, ice cream

Weight:

• cotton wool, weight, rod
• meat grinder, feather, dumbbells

Thus, the development of the cognitive abilities of children must be subordinated not only to the content, but also to the methods of work. It is necessary to build classes so that children can broaden their horizons, develop curiosity and inquisitiveness, train attention, imagination, memory, and thinking. All these cognitive processes under the influence of cognitive interest acquire a special activity and direction.A variety of techniques help to educate and develop interest in knowledge. Children are very curious and many of them come to school with a great desire to learn. But so that this desire does not quickly fade away, everything possible must be done so that they can show their abilities, and this requires skillful guidance from the teacher and educator. The stability of interest is the key to a positive and active attitude of children to learning, the basis for the full assimilation of knowledge. In my work, I strive to create conditions that provide the child with success in learning, a sense of joy on the path of progress from ignorance to knowledge, from inability to skill.

Development of cognitive processes:

Perception - development of organized perception, control over the correctness and completeness of purposeful perception. Development of detailed perception. Dominance of the emotionally significant aspects of the object.

Memory - development of arbitrary memory. There is an intensive formation of memorization techniques. Increasing the role of logical memory. It is better to remember similar or different things.

Thinking - visual-figurative. In the process, it acquires an abstract and generalized nature of the solution of a mental problem, connected with the transformation of the objective world. Mental operations are developed: analysis, synthesis, comparison, classification, reasoning. Transition to private and general judgments.

Imagination - more realistic. The recreative imagination is intensively formed. Free fantasy.

Interests of modern junior schoolchildren:

From classes to preschool age The greatest interest in children is the game. This interest is retained to a large extent among younger students.

Children are interested in everything at school: they like to listen to the teacher, raise their hand, stand up and answer questions, read aloud, write in notebooks, get marks. But gradually the interests are refined, differentiated. Likes and dislikes appear.

Already in the second grade, it is noticeable that some children like to read aloud and talk more, others are interested in counting and solving problems, some prefer to draw or do physical education. In grade III, this selective interest in academic subjects becomes even more noticeable and manifests itself in extracurricular activities. Children begin, on their own initiative and of their own choice, to read certain fiction or popular literature.

At the same time, these interests are becoming deeper. If in the first and the beginning of the second grade children are mainly interested in facts, events, story plots, then from the end of the second year of study they are no less interested in explaining these facts, their reasons.

Personal development in early childhood. Crisis 7 years.

Personal development: At primary school age, actively develops motivational sphere, appear learning needs. Leading at this age are cognitive needs. Great value for personal development elementary school student acquire motives for establishing and maintaining positive relationships with peers. In general, motivation develops in the direction awareness, acquires arbitrary character. Learning activities require children responsibility and contributes to its formation as a personality trait.

At the age of 6-7 - 10-11 years, intensively develops self-awareness: the child begins to understand that he is an individual who is subjected to social influences: he is obliged to learn and in the process of learning to change himself, appropriating collective signs, collective concepts, knowledge, ideas that exist in society, a system of social expectations regarding behavior and value orientations; at the same time, the child experiences his uniqueness, his selfhood, seeks to assert himself among adults and peers. In educational activities, the student develops ideas about himself, self-esteem, skills of self-control and self-regulation are formed.

At primary school age, there is a transition from concrete situational to generalized self-esteem. At this age develops self-knowledge andpersonal reflection as the ability to independently set the boundaries of their capabilities("Can I or can't solve this problem?", "What am I missing to solve it?") (I.V. Shapovalenko). Reflection is manifested in the ability to highlight the features of one's own actions and make them the subject of analysis. By the end of primary school age, such volitional character traits as independence, perseverance, endurance.

Crisis of seven years

Loss of childish spontaneity (mannering, clowning, antics - protective functions from traumatic experiences)

Generalization of experiences and the emergence of inner mental life

Challenging, disobedience, cunning, demonstrative "adulthood" - the psychological meaning of these behavioral features is to understand the rules, to increase the intrinsic value of actions independently organized by the child himself

The Need for Social Functioning

The child's behavior loses its childish immediacy. The symptoms of the crisis are mannerisms, clownishness, antics of children, which perform protective functions from traumatic experiences. At preschool age, a child goes from realizing himself as a physically separate independent individual to realizing his feelings and experiences. These experiences are primarily related to specific activities: “I draw great - I got the roundest apple”, “I can jump over puddles, I'm dexterous”, “I'm so clumsy, I always stumble into catching up”. The child begins to navigate in his feelings and experiences, relate to himself on the basis of a generalization of experiences.

But these are not the only signs of the onset of a crisis period. Other new behavioral characteristics that are clearly visible in the home situation:

The occurrence of a pause between the appeal to the child and his response ("as if he does not hear", "it is necessary to repeat a hundred times");

The appearance of a challenge on the part of the child of the need to fulfill the parent's request or the delay in the time of its execution;

Disobedience as a refusal of habitual affairs and duties;

Cunning as a violation of established rules in a hidden form (shows wet hands instead of washed ones);

Demonstrative "adulthood", sometimes up to a caricature, demeanor;

Increased attention to their appearance and clothing,

the main thing is not to look “like a little”.

There are also such manifestations as stubbornness, exactingness, reminders of promises, whims, a heightened reaction to criticism and the expectation of praise. Positives can include:

Interest in communicating with an adult and introducing new topics into it (about politics, about life in other countries and on other planets, about moral and ethical principles, about school);

Independence in hobbies and in the performance of individual duties assumed by one's own decision;

Discretion.

The psychological meaning of these features of behavior consists in understanding the rules, in increasing the intrinsic value of actions independently organized by the child himself. One of the main neoplasms is the need for social functioning, the ability to occupy a significant social position.

The main forms of assistance to the child in living through the difficulties of the crisis period of 7 years are an explanation of the causal grounds for the requirements (why it is necessary to do something in this way and not otherwise); providing opportunities to carry out new forms of independent activity; a reminder of the need to complete the assignment, an expression of confidence in the child's ability to cope with it.

The "erasing" of symptoms of negative behavior and the lack of desire for independence at home slows down the formation of readiness for schooling.

29. Development of communication in primary school age. Psychological neoplasms of primary school age.

Actual problems of the modern primary school student, essence and ways of overcoming. Younger schoolchildren at risk, psychological and pedagogical assistance.

Reasons for failure:

1. Family:

· insufficient attention to education and training of the younger generation.

· difficult life situations(birth of another child in the family, conflict between parents, difficulties in self-determination).

· family parenting style

COURSE WORK

in psychology

"Cognitive processes in primary school

age"

INTRODUCTION 3

1. FACTORS OF DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES 4

2. GENERAL PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHILDREN 5
JUNIOR SCHOOL AGE

3. DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH AND THINKING IN YOUNGER CHILDREN 9
SCHOOL AGE

3.2. Thinking 14

4. DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION, MEMORY AND IMAGINATION IN CHILDREN 19
JUNIOR SCHOOL AGE

4.1 Attention 19

4.2 Memory 22

4.3 Imagination 24

5. DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTION IN CHILDREN OF JUNIOR SCHOOL 26
AGE

CONCLUSION 29

References 30

INTRODUCTION:

Primary school age is one of the favorable periods for the development of mental cognitive processes. Most scientists are convinced of the huge role of this age interval in the formation, development and improvement of cognitive processes - perception, memory, attention; the formation of higher mental functions - speech, reading, writing, counting, which allows a child of primary school age to perform more complex (compared to a preschooler), mental operations. The child's speech becomes freer, more arbitrary, vocabulary increases, generalization and abstraction become available. Since at this age there is an active development of all these functions, the child needs direct assistance from adults in their development.

Primary school age - the child becomes a schoolboy, which leads to the restructuring of his entire system of life relationships.

He has new responsibilities, which are now determined not only by adults, but also by surrounding peers.

If in the previous periods of age development the main type of activity of the child was the game, now purposeful cognitive activity comes to the fore, during which the child receives and processes huge amounts of information.

The success of training depends on the development of individual mental processes. And if younger students develop memory, attention, imagination, thinking (the development of which, by the way, can be carried out in the game), they adapt much more easily to the educational process. If readiness for schooling is represented as a flower, then in order for this flower to bloom, it needs strong roots. Such roots are a good level of memory development. Today we often come across facts when intellectually prepared children do not know how to hold their attention on anything for a long time, they do not have imagination. Such children do not cope with tasks that require figurative thinking. They do not know how to dream, invent, fantasize, and this is the main condition for creativity and cognitive activity.

I believe that it is relevant today to study and explore cognitive processes in primary school age, in order to create the conditions necessary for their development in children.

The purpose of my work is to study the formation and development of cognitive processes in primary school age.

The subject of research is cognitive processes. The object of the study is younger students.

To achieve this goal, the following tasks are required:

1. To study the factors of development of cognitive processes;

2. Give a general psychological description of children of primary school age;

3. To study the development of speech, thinking, attention, memory, imagination and perception in children of primary school age

1. FACTORS OF DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES

Through various activities, mental processes they are formed in it.

The improvement of the child's sensory perception is connected, firstly, with the ability to better use their sensory apparatus as a result of their exercise; secondly, an essential role is played by the ability to more and more meaningfully interpret sensory data, which is associated with the general mental development of the child.

In a preschooler, the process of assimilation is involuntary, he remembers, since the material, as it were, settles in him. Imprinting is not a goal, but an involuntary product of the child’s activity: he repeats an action that attracts him or requires the repetition of a story that interests him, not in order to remember it, but because it is interesting to him, and as a result he remembers. Memorization is built mainly on the basis of the game as the main type of activity.

The main transformation in the functional development of memory, which characterizes the first school age, is the transformation of imprinting into a consciously directed process of memorization. At school age, memorization is rebuilt on the basis of learning. Memorization begins to proceed from certain tasks and goals, it becomes a volitional process. Its organization also becomes different, planned: the dismemberment of the material and its repetition are consciously used. The next essential point is the further restructuring of memory on the basis of abstract thinking developing in the child. The essence of the restructuring of memory in a schoolchild is not so much in the transition from mechanical to semantic memory, but in the restructuring of semantic memory itself, which acquires a more mediated and logical character.

Children's imagination is also first manifested and formed in the game, as well as modeling, drawing, singing, etc. Actually creative and even combinatorial moments in the imagination are not so significant at first, they develop in the process of the general mental development of the child. The first line in the development of the imagination is an increasing freedom in relation to perception. The second, even more significant, comes in later years. It lies in the fact that the imagination passes from the subjective forms of fantasizing to the objectivizing forms of creative imagination, embodied in the objective products of creativity. If the fantasizing of a teenager differs from a child's game in that for its constructions it dispenses with reference points in directly given, tangible objects of reality, then mature creative imagination differs from youthful fantasizing in that it is embodied in objective, tangible for others, products of creative activity.

An essential prerequisite for the development of a healthy, fruitful imagination is the expansion and enrichment of the student's experience. It is also important to familiarize him with new aspects of objective reality, which, on the basis of his narrow everyday experience, must seem unusual to him; it is necessary that the child feel that the unusual can also be real, otherwise the child's imagination will be timid and stereotyped. It is very important to develop in a child the ability to criticize and, in particular, a critical attitude towards himself, towards his own thoughts, otherwise his imagination will be only a fantasy. The student should be taught to use his imagination in academic work, into real activity, and did not turn into an idle fantasizing divorced from life, creating only a smoke screen from life.

Thought processes are primarily performed as subordinate components of some "practical" (at least - in a child - play) external activity, and only then - thinking is singled out as a special, relatively independent "theoretical" cognitive activity. As the child in the process of systematic learning begins to master some subject - arithmetic, natural science, geography, history, i.e., a body of knowledge, even elementary, but built in the form of a system, the child's thinking inevitably begins to restructure. The construction of a knowledge system of any scientific subject presupposes the division of what in perception is very often merged, merged, but not essentially connected with each other, the allocation of homogeneous properties that are essentially interconnected. In the process of mastering the subject content of knowledge built on new principles, the child forms and develops forms of rational activity that are characteristic of scientific thinking. Thinking acquires a new content - a systematized and more or less generalized content of experience. Systematized and generalized experience, rather than isolated situations, becomes the main support base for his mental operations.

During the first period of systematic schooling, mastering the first fundamentals of the knowledge system, the child enters the field of abstraction. He penetrates into it and overcomes the difficulties of generalization, moving simultaneously from two sides - from the general to the particular, and from the particular to the general. In the process of learning, mastery of scientific concepts is accomplished. In assimilating a system of theoretical knowledge in the course of education, the child at this highest stage of development learns to "explore the nature of the concepts themselves," revealing their increasingly abstract properties through their interrelationships; empirical in its content, rational in its form, thinking passes into theoretical thinking in abstract concepts.

2. GENERAL PSYCHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CHILDREN OF PRIMARY SCHOOL AGE

Primary school age covers the period of life from 6 to 11 years and is determined by the most important circumstance in a child's life - his admission to school. At this time there is intense biological development children's body (central and vegetative nervous systems, bone and muscle systems, the activity of internal organs). At the heart of such a restructuring (it is also called the second physiological crisis) is a distinct endocrine shift - the "new" endocrine glands are activated and the "old" glands cease to operate. Although the physiological essence of this crisis has not yet been fully determined, according to a number of scientists, at about the age of 7 years, the active activity of the thymus gland stops, as a result of which the brake is removed from the activity of the sex and a number of other endocrine glands, for example, the pituitary gland and the adrenal cortex, which gives rise to production of sex hormones such as androgens and estrogens. Such a physiological restructuring requires a lot of stress from the child's body in order to mobilize all the reserves.

During this period, the mobility of nervous processes increases, excitation processes predominate, and this determines such characteristic features of younger students as increased emotional excitability and restlessness. This crisis was vividly expressed by the young Pushkin. In his book “The Life of A. Pushkin,” B. Meilakh writes that when the boy was 7 years old, an unexpected change occurred in his very appearance: the former drowsiness was suddenly replaced by playfulness and pranks that crossed all boundaries. From timid, clumsy, silent, he suddenly turned into an unbridled, temperamental, mockingly witty. The boy constantly caused reproaches, censures, nervous outbursts of parents and tutors.

By the age of 7, the frontal regions of the cerebral hemispheres mature morphologically, which creates the basis for a greater harmony of the processes of excitation and inhibition than in preschool children, which is necessary for the development of purposeful voluntary behavior. Since muscle development and methods of controlling it do not go synchronously, children of this age have features in the organization of movement. The development of large muscles is ahead of the development of small ones, and therefore children are better at performing strong and sweeping movements than small ones that require precision (for example, when writing). At the same time, growing physical endurance, increased efficiency are relative, and in general, increased fatigue and neuropsychic vulnerability remain characteristic of children. This is manifested in the fact that their performance usually drops sharply 25-30 minutes after the start of the lesson and after the second lesson. Children get tired in case of attending an extended day group, as well as with increased emotional saturation of lessons and activities. Physiological transformations cause great changes in the mental life of the child. To the center mental development the formation of arbitrariness (planning, implementation of action programs and control) is put forward. There is an improvement in cognitive processes (perception, memory, attention), the formation of higher mental functions (speech, writing, reading, counting), which allows a child of primary school age to perform more complex mental operations compared to a preschooler. Under favorable conditions for learning and a sufficient level of mental development, on this basis, prerequisites arise for the development of theoretical thinking and consciousness. Under the guidance of a teacher, children begin to assimilate the content of the main forms of human culture (science, art, morality) and learn to act in accordance with the traditions and new social expectations of people. It is at this age that the child for the first time clearly begins to realize the relationship between him and others, to understand the social motives of behavior, moral assessments, significance conflict situations, that is, gradually enters the conscious phase of personality formation.

With the advent of school, the emotional sphere of the child changes. On the one hand, younger schoolchildren, especially first-graders, retain to a large extent the property characteristic of preschoolers to react violently to individual events and situations that affect them. Children are sensitive to the influences of the surrounding conditions of life, impressionable and emotionally responsive. They perceive, first of all, those objects or properties of objects that evoke a direct emotional response, an emotional attitude. Visual, bright, lively is perceived best of all. On the other hand, going to school gives rise to new, specific emotional experiences, since the freedom of preschool age is replaced by dependence and submission to the new rules of life. The situation of school life introduces the child into a strictly normalized world of relationships, requiring him to be organized, responsible, disciplined, and perform well. Toughening the living conditions, the new social situation in each child who enters school increases mental tension. This affects both the health of younger students and their behavior.

Entering school is such an event in the life of a child, in which two defining motives of his behavior necessarily come into conflict: the motive of desire (“I want”) and the motive of duty (“must”). If the motive of desire always comes from the child himself, then the motive of obligation is more often initiated by adults. In the book “As for Me... Doubts and Worries of the Youngest Schoolchildren”, we tried to trace how children can resolve this conflict between “I want” and “need”, what ways out of the situation they can choose. According to the logic that has been used more than once in Russian fairy tales, there can be at least four of these paths: forward, backward, left and right.

The first path, “must”, is a direct path “forward” to adulthood with its norms, requirements and obligations. The second way, "I want", is a kind of retreat "back", a defensive regression to early childhood forms of behavior. The third way, "to the left", is used by the so-called "rational" children, who are trying with all their might to transform the school situation in such a way that children's "I want" instead of adults "necessary" are in charge of it. Such children openly doubt the very content of adult norms and requirements, they always offer something, change the original rules, protest and quickly turn off work if they are not followed and they are not obeyed. These children are rather inconvenient for adults, as they always have their own opinion and tend to contradict adults (conflict). The fourth way, "to the right", is the most interesting for us. A child who chooses this path strives with all his might to comply with all the “needs” that follow from a particular situation. But he is not entirely satisfied with how he does it. As a result, he withdraws into himself and experiences everything very deeply. He has bright, emotionally colored states. He is torn apart by contradictions between the most diverse aspirations, desires and desires. The child cannot accept himself in a situation and therefore, more or less consciously, seeks to transform not the outer, but his inner mental world, to somehow relieve internal tension and discomfort, i.e., to defend himself with the help of psychological mechanisms. And here something he succeeds, but something does not. And if some experiences remain poorly realized and unreacted, they can turn into psychological complexes, which we often observe in adults. Whatever strategy the child chooses, the inability to meet the new norms and requirements of adults inevitably makes him doubt and worry. A child who enters school becomes extremely dependent on the opinions, assessments and attitudes of the people around him. Awareness of critical remarks addressed to him affects his well-being and leads to a change in self-esteem. If before school some individual characteristics of the child could not interfere with his natural development, were accepted and taken into account by adults, then at school there is a standardization of living conditions, as a result of which emotional and behavioral deviations of personality traits become especially noticeable. First of all, hyperexcitability, hypersensitivity, poor self-control, misunderstanding of the norms and rules of adults reveal themselves. The dependence of the younger student is growing more and more not only on the opinions of adults (parents and teachers), but also on the opinions of their peers. This leads to the fact that he begins to experience fears of a special kind: that he will be considered ridiculous, a coward, a deceiver, or weak-willed. As noted

A. I. Zakharov, if fears prevail in preschool age,
caused by the instinct of self-preservation, then in primary school
age, social fears prevail as a threat to the well-being of the individual
in the context of his relationship with others.

In most cases, the child adapts himself to a new life situation, and various forms of protective behavior help him in this. In new relationships with adults and peers, the child continues to develop reflection on himself and others. At the same time, whether he succeeds or fails, he can, figuratively

V. S. Mukhina, to fall "in the trap of accompanying negative formations",
feeling superior to others or envy. In the same time
developing ability to identify with others helps to remove
the pressure of negative formations and develop the accepted positive forms of communication.

Thus, entering school leads not only to the formation of the need for knowledge and recognition, but also to the development of a sense of personality. The child begins to occupy a new place within family relationships: he is a student, he is a responsible person, he is consulted and considered. The assimilation of the norms of behavior developed by society allows the child to gradually turn them into his own, internal, requirements for himself.

3. DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH AND THINKING IN YOUNGER CHILDREN kj SCHOOL AGE

The development of speech is determined by the child's need for communication. Throughout childhood, the child intensively masters speech. Developing speech in the phonetic and grammatical periods is not yet separated from nonverbal behavior, that is, it is situational: it can only be understood with regard to the situation in which the child is included. At this time, the equivalent of a sentence can be a single word that reflects a particular subject situation. The peculiarity of situational speech is in its pictorial character. The child portrays more than expresses. He makes extensive use of facial expressions, pantomime, gestures, intonation and other expressive means. Later, when the child faces a new task: to speak about an object that is outside the immediate situation in which he is, so that any listener can understand it, he masters a form of speech that is completely understandable from its context.

The first form of speech that occurs in a child is dialogue; it is loud external speech. Then another form develops, the one that accompanies actions; it is also loud, but it does not serve for communication, but is rather a “speech for oneself”, “egocentric”. The volume of this form of speech at three years reaches its maximum value (75% of all speech), from three to six years it gradually decreases, and after seven years it practically disappears. Egocentric speech also has a social character. This can be seen from experiments when a child whose speech was at the stage of egocentrism was placed in a group of children who did not understand him (deaf-mute or foreign-speaking), so that any verbal communication was excluded. It turned out that in this situation the observed child experienced a regression - egocentric speech practically disappeared (the child stopped talking to himself as well).

Egocentric speech programs a way out of a difficult situation for the child, and later it is included in the processes of thinking, performing the role of planning actions and organizing behavior. It is a transitional stage from external to internal speech. Going inside, interiorizing, speech significantly changes its syntax. As the experiments of L.S.

Vygotsky, inner speech does not contain a subject, but only indicates what needs to be done, in which direction to direct the action.

The vast majority of children under the age of 6 initially perceive the sentence as a single semantic whole. Separate words in a sentence are singled out by the child only insofar as they are associated with visual representations.

Lena P. (6 years old) is told: “The tree has fallen. How many words are there? She replies: "One word." - "Why?" "Because it alone fell."

Starting to break down sentences, the child, first of all, singles out specific categories of words - nouns and verbs. Later, he singles out more abstract categories - prepositions and conjunctions, since they are devoid of objective significance and express only relations between objects. Children under the age of 6 do not isolate relationships well, therefore the stock of words they actively use is characterized by a sharp predominance of nouns and verbs over adjectives and numerals, and even more so over prepositions and conjunctions. Naturally, in this case, during the perception of speech, a concrete image of the situation arises in the child, corresponding to the literal meaning of the phrase. Here are some examples:

The child is told: "There is a movie." He asks: “Where?”. - “The clock is behind.” - “From whom?” “Why do they say that in war people kill each other? Aren't they friends?"

The word is not filled with meaning immediately, but in the process of accumulating the child's own experience. In the first year and a half of life, the meanings of the object, action, and sign are equivalent for the child. During this period, according to the observations of A. R. Luria, for example, the word “whoa” can mean both a horse and a whip, and they went and stopped. Only at the moment when a suffix is ​​added to this amorphous word, the meaning of the word sharply narrows: “whoa” turns into “tprunka” and begins to denote only a certain object (horse), ceasing to refer to actions or qualities.

The narrowing of the meanings of a single word requires an expansion of the vocabulary, therefore, with the appearance of the first suffixes, a jump in the enrichment of the child's vocabulary is associated. Emphasizing new parts of a word (such as a suffix) guides the categorization, since each of them places the word in a new semantic field. So, the word "ink" does not simply designate an object, but immediately introduces it into a whole system of semantic fields. The root “black-”, denoting color, includes this attribute in the semantic field of color, i.e., in a number of other color designations (white, yellow, light, dark). The suffix "-il-" indicates the function of the tool and introduces the word "ink" into the semantic field of objects that have the same attribute (white, chisel, soap). The suffix "-nits-" highlights another essential feature - receptacles (sugar bowl, pepper pot, coffee pot, soap dish).

By the time of entering school, the child's vocabulary increases so much that he can freely explain himself to another person on any occasion related to everyday life and within the scope of his interests. If a three-year-old normally developed child uses up to 500 or more words, then a six-year-old - from 3000 to 7000 words. The vocabulary of a child in elementary grades consists of nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, numerals and connecting conjunctions. Along with the expansion of the dictionary, the semantic content of words is also expanding. The meaning of the word is specified in childhood gradually. At first, behind the word is a random combination of those impressions that the child receives from the outside world at the moment the word is heard. Then, separate, not necessarily essential, visual signs of specific practical situations are combined in the word, and much later, only as a teenager, a person begins to designate abstract categories with words. The word is a vessel that is given to the child ready, but it fills it with content on its own, therefore the meanings of words in a child are different than in an adult. The child focuses mainly on his personal experience. Combining objects into classes, he proceeds not from the essential, but from the most conspicuous signs. At first, the word for him does not mean a concept, but a complex in which objects are collected according to arbitrary characteristics.

Junior schoolboy Anton Klinushkov writes his own book. In it he writes down his thoughts. For example, this one: “My thoughts are to become a dreamer. A fantasist is the one who invents everything. Interestingly, "fantastic" - is it from the word "fantasy" or "fantasy"?

Gradually, the child ceases to form such complexes, but up to adolescence he continues to think in them, and not in true concepts. As a result, although the speech of a child and a teenager may coincide with the speech of an adult in terms of the use of words, however, in terms of their internal content, these words are often quite different. It must be understood that the use by a child of certain speech forms does not mean at all that he has realized the content for the expression of which they serve !., that is, he has a fairly complete semantic field of the word.

Once we asked younger students to answer the question: “Who do you think is the smartest in the world?”. Here are the answers the children gave us:

■ grandmother, because she lived a lot,

■ mother, because she buys chocolates, pampers and is good at scolding,

■ God, because he invented people, animals and nature - no man would have guessed before,

■ Katya, because she draws better than me,

■ our teacher, because she teaches us reading, math, writing and physical education,

■ Michael Jackson because he defeated the robot,

■ scientists, they studied well at school.

It turns out that in children's awareness, the meaning of the expression "to be smart" is the same as "defeating a robot", "teach physical education" and "live long in the world."

Of course, this cannot but make an adult think about what criteria children use when orienting themselves in the world around them. Speech communication involves not only the variety of words used and the meaningfulness of what is being said. For cultural speech, the construction of the sentence, the clarity of the expressed thought and how the child addresses another person, how he pronounces the message, how expressive and expressive his speech is are also important.

The speech of the child can be very expressive. But it can also be careless, excessively fast or slow, lethargic or quiet. It is interesting that children of 7-9 years old often allow themselves to speak not only in order to express an idea, but sometimes simply in order to keep the interlocutor's attention. This usually happens with close adults or with peers during the game. In this case, the child asks the adult: “Is it interesting to tell you?” or “Do you like the story I wrote?” Such questions asked by the child are an indicator that he has difficulties in constructing meaningful contextual speech.

At primary school age, the child gradually begins to master the written language. She is more abstracted from the situation. Otherwise motivated. Much more arbitrary than oral speech. Written speech is a special way of communication and formation of thought. D. B. Elkonin identifies several specific features of written speech in comparison with oral speech. First, it's a big randomness. The ability to divide a word into its constituent sounds is the first arbitrary operation that a child must master when writing. Then follows the ability to give thoughts a syntactically developed form, which requires the dismemberment of the thought itself, which at the moment of its occurrence represents an undivided semantic whole. By accustoming the child to the division of the flow of thought, to its design and detailed expression, written speech thereby disciplines thinking. The child perceives and memorizes written structures mainly through reading. Reading is the subject of schooling that paves the way for independent mastery of written language. The structures of written speech memorized during reading gradually become structural forms of the child's own thought and its design. However, this is only possible if the child develops the ability to focus on communication with an imaginary reader who is able to understand his author's point of view.

Indeed, learning to read marks a fundamental progress in the mental development of the child. Having mastered reading, the child for the first time can regulate his behavior, regardless of the inevitable limitations of direct contacts; now he is able to actively absorb the experience of mankind, summarized in the texts. At the first stages of mastering reading, children often prefer texts that they knew before learning. This circumstance sometimes even worries some parents.

Is their offspring lagging behind in mental development? Meanwhile, this is a normal and necessary stage of its improvement. Suppose a child knows some rhyme by heart. Now, when he reads it, the task of understanding is reduced only to the process of recognition. Here, comprehension is not required, since it was achieved earlier, when this rhyme was read and explained to the child, they helped to correlate the meaning of the rhyme with the personal experience available to him. Since it is no longer necessary to understand the rhyme, the task is greatly simplified and when reading an unfamiliar text, you can use this technique and correlate the meaning of what you read with personal experience

Only on your own. Gradually, the original method of text analysis, which was carried out on the basis of only personal experience, changes. It is supplemented by new ones and can now be produced in two ways: as before - on the basis of one's own experience, and on the basis of the generalized experience of mankind acquired while reading. However, even later, when reading becomes automatic, only the correlation of what is read with personal experience will be perceived as understanding.

So, in order to express his thought in writing, the child must first create an imaginary situation. At first, the transition to an imaginary situation is difficult for children, so they use a number of facilitating techniques: compose a text based on a specific situation in their lives, concretize the dialogue, introducing descriptive situational moments and reader-oriented remarks into it. Therefore, work with children on the plan of what they read and on the plan of the children's story is of such great importance for the development of written speech. As long as there is no internal plan, they try to build an essay according to the principles of organizing external speech, and this is inconvenient. The situation changes, and the construction of the story becomes easier only when the outer plane becomes the inner one. The transition from oral to written speech at first is usually recommended to be carried out with the help of a questionnaire given to children or pictures that play the role of a plan. The maximum possibilities of written speech are found (according to D. B. Elkonin and V. V. Davydov) in the practice of free writing. This should be given maximum attention in elementary school. After learning the technique of writing, children usually begin to write on their own. They design magazines, write ads, letters, diaries, movie scripts. This is woven into the fabric of children's play and often occupies a rather large place in the life of a younger student.

Another source of written speech is the oral answers of students in front of the class, which are built according to the canons of written speech: they are detailed, addressed to the collective listener, saturated with the abstract content of school knowledge, reasoning, and justification. In the conditions of a school lesson, when the teacher invites the child to answer questions or asks to retell the text he heard, the student is required to work on the word, sentence and coherent speech.

In written speech, more often than in oral speech, there is a logically detailed motivation for answering a question. The association in written speech is mainly focused on the meaning of the stimulus word and stimulates mainly the processes of internal attention, while oral speech in a number of cases is complicated by situational moments that it cannot overcome. This strongly suggests that thinking is much more closely related to written language than to spoken language.

The technology we proposed for studying and correcting defensive behavior includes the use of written and, less often, oral dialogues with children based on drawings made on emotionally significant topics. Such systematic interaction gives a child of primary school age the opportunity to develop inner attention, learn to more clearly present and express their thoughts, while experiencing and realizing personal problems and difficulties.

3.2. Thinking

Thinking is the process of cognition of reality on the basis of establishing connections and relationships between objects and phenomena of the surrounding world. cognitive activity and the curiosity of the child is constantly directed to the knowledge of the world and the construction of his own picture of this world. Thinking is inextricably linked with speech. The more active the child is mentally, the more questions he asks and the more diverse these questions are.

Younger students use the widest typology of questions. For example, at one of our lessons they asked questions of the following types: what is it?., who is it?., why?., why?., for what?., from what?., is there? ., from whom?., from where?., how?., whom?., what?., what will happen if?., where?., how much?

As a rule, when formulating a question, children of primary school age imagine the real situation and how they act in this situation. Such thinking, in which the solution of the problem occurs as a result of internal actions with images of perception or representation, is called visual-figurative. Visual-figurative is the main type of thinking in primary school age. A verbally expressed thought that does not have support in visual representations can be difficult for these children to understand. Of course, a younger student can think logically, but it should be remembered that this age is more sensitive to learning based on visualization.

What distinguishes the logic of a child?

Concreteness. Children's judgments are usually isolated and based on personal experience. Therefore, they are categorical and usually refer to visual reality. Since the child's thinking is concrete, it is not surprising that he prefers to reduce everything to the particular when explaining something and loves to read books with a plot full of all sorts of adventures.

Similarity Judgments. At this age, the chain of judgments - inferences - is rarely used. The main role in thinking during this period is played by memory, judgments by analogy are very widely used, therefore the earliest form of proof is an example. Given this feature, convincing or explaining something to a child, it is necessary to reinforce your speech with a clear example.

Egocentrism is considered as a central feature of pre-conceptual thinking. Due to egocentrism, the child does not fall into the sphere of his own reflection. He cannot look at himself from the outside, because he is not able to freely transform the reference system, the beginning of which is rigidly connected with himself, with his "I". Vivid examples of the egocentrism of children's thinking are the facts when children do not include themselves among them when listing members of their family. They do not always correctly understand situations that require some detachment from their own point of view and acceptance of someone else's position. Phrases like "And if you were in his place?" or “Would it be nice for you if they did this to you?” - often do not have the proper impact on children of preschool and primary school age, because they do not cause the desired reaction of empathy.

Egocentrism does not allow children to take to heart someone else's experience, expressed purely verbally (without empathy). Overcoming children's egocentrism presupposes the assimilation of reversible operations. Only the formation of Decentration and immersion of cognitive processes allows you to look at yourself from the outside. Fairy tales play an important role in the formation of decentration. Let's show this on the example of a Norwegian fairy tale.

The little chicken, walking, felt lonely, he became bored, and he decided to find a friend to play with. The first person he met was an earthworm. In response to the invitation of the chicken to play with him, he replied: “Well, how can I play with you when you are so big!”. The chicken was upset that he was so big, and wandered on and met a calf. In response to a request to play, he said: “How can I play with you when you are so small?”. "What am I really?" - the puzzled chicken asked himself, and after thinking he guessed that in relation to the worm he was large, and in relation to the cow - small.

The game helps to overcome egocentrism, since it acts as a real practice of changing positions, as a practice of relating to a partner in the game from the point of view of the role that the child performs. This goal is served by a variety of role-playing games (in "daughters-mothers", "hospital", "school", "shop", etc.). However, not only the game, but also any communication with peers contributes to decentration, i.e., correlating one's point of view with the positions of other people.

As long as the child's intellectual operations are self-centered, this does not enable him to distinguish between a subjective point of view and objective relations. Decentration, the free transfer of the coordinate system, removes these restrictions and stimulates the formation of conceptual thinking. Then there is an expansion of the mental field, which allows you to build a system of relationships and classes that are not dependent on the position of your own "I". Developing decentration allows you to move from the future to the past and back, which makes it possible to look at your life from any time position and even from a moment outside your own life. Decentration creates the prerequisites for the formation of identification, i.e. the ability of a person to move away from his own egocentric position, to accept the point of view of another. At the pre-conceptual level, direct and inverse operations are not yet combined into fully reversible compositions, and this predetermines defects in understanding. The main one is insensitivity to contradiction, which leads to the fact that children repeat the same mistake many times.

The specificity of pre-conceptual thinking is also manifested in such feature, as the lack of ideas about the conservation of quantity. Children's thinking based on evidence leads them to erroneous conclusions.

Children of seven years old were shown two balls of dough of the same volume and to the question: “Are they equal?” - received the answer: "Equal". Then, in front of their eyes, one of the balls was flattened, turning it into a cake. The children saw that not a single piece of dough was added to this flattened ball, but simply changed its shape. The question was: "Where is more test?". And the children answered: "In a cake." They saw that the cake takes up more space on the table than the ball. Their thinking, following visual perception, led them to the conclusion that there was now more dough in the cake than in the ball.

Children do not understand that during the transformation of the ball, two changes occur simultaneously, mutually compensating for each other. The child first takes into account only one of them, then suddenly opens another parameter, but immediately forgets about the first one. The older child hesitates, shifting attention from one change to another, and finally begins to link them. At this point, it becomes clear that both parameters are inversely related and that they balance each other. From the moment when children discover the compensation of relationships, they have the concept of conservation of the amount of matter when changing shape. Such examples show that the ability to realize a certain identity of an object that changes, but is perceived in various manifestations, is acquired gradually. Children are sure that equality is violated if objects differ in some noticeable and easily perceived properties. When the shape of an object, such as a ball, changes, the child cannot understand that the ball can be given the same shape, so such fundamental concepts as, for example, mass conservation are not available to him. As a result, things appear to him as heavy or light in accordance with direct perception: the child always considers large things heavy, small things light.

Transaction is a feature of pre-conceptual thinking associated with the operation of single cases. It is carried out by the child both instead of induction and instead of deduction, leading to the confusion of the essential properties of objects with their random features.

A seven-year-old child was asked: "Is the sun alive?" - "But why?" - "It's moving." This answer shows that the child does not use either the inductive or the deductive method, but performs transduction.

Syncretism is also an essential feature of pre-conceptual thinking. This operation of linking everything to everything is used by children for both analysis and synthesis. Instead of classifying objects, children liken them more or less roughly and, going from one object to another, ascribe to the latter all the properties of the former. Due to syncretism, two phenomena perceived simultaneously are immediately included in the general scheme, and cause-and-effect relationships are replaced by subjective relationships imposed by perception.

First grader Rachel came home late from school. In response to her mother's question about what happened, she said that on the way home she passed Sally's house and saw that Sally was sitting in the yard crying because she had lost her doll. "Oh," Mom said, "and you stopped by to help Sally look for the doll?" - "No, Mommy," Rachel replied, "I stopped to help Sally cry."

Thus, to explain some property of an object, children use other properties of the same object. Syncretism is responsible for the fact that the child cannot systematically explore the object, compare its parts and understand their relationships.

The examples given show that children cannot be denied logic, but it differs significantly from the logic of adults. It is useful to emphasize that the features of pre-conceptual thinking are not rigidly predetermined by age, their overcoming can be accelerated by specially organized training.

With normal age development, there is a natural replacement of pre-conceptual thinking, the components of which are concrete images, with conceptual thinking, where concepts are already components and formal operations are applied. Conceptual thinking does not arise immediately, but gradually, through a series of intermediate stages. So, L. S. Vygotsky singled out five stages. The first (for a child of 2-3 years old) manifests itself in the fact that, when asked to put together similar, matching objects, the child puts together any, believing that those that are placed next to each other are suitable. This is the syncretism of early childhood thinking. At the second stage (4-6 years old), children use the elements of objective similarity of two objects, but already the third one can only be similar to one of the first pair: a chain of pairwise similarities arises. The third stage manifests itself at school age (6-8 years): children can combine a group of objects by similarity, but they cannot recognize and name the signs that characterize this group. In adolescents, when mental actions become reversible, conceptual thinking appears, but it is still imperfect, since primary concepts are formed on the basis of subjective everyday experience and are not supported by socially generalized data. Perfect concepts are formed only at the fifth stage, in adolescence when the use of unified theoretical provisions allows you to go beyond your own experience and objectively determine the boundaries of the class - concept.

Learning to accelerate the development of thinking is aimed at clarifying the nature of relationships and connections between objects, and the best way to understand relationships is to be able to change them and observe the results. Therefore, for learning, the directed changes made by the child in the external environment are used - in the process of play, experiment, labor.

Advanced educators are well aware of this, and that is why, when the boom in the field of superconductivity began in 1986, a kit was immediately put on sale in Japan, allowing a child to synthesize a superconducting substance himself. From his own experience, he was convinced that the magnet "hangs" over a superconductor cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen, as if contrary to the force of gravity.

A controlled experiment accessible to a child is a game. It allows you to develop thinking, revealing the relationship between goals and means to achieve them, and thereby expands subjective experience. In addition, it should be remembered that the child is not able to deeply assimilate the theoretical knowledge presented to him in finished form, but can come to them through his own activity. In order to study a variety of objects, it is necessary to act with them independently: transform, move, connect, combine. To do this, the child must learn to group - to unite actions and objects according to their similarities and differences.

When a child himself pours water from two glasses of equal diameter into two glasses of different diameters, at first he thinks that the amount of water depends on the diameter of the glass. If you give a child the opportunity to pour water again and again from two equal glasses into two different glasses, then his understanding of what is happening gradually changes. Explanations appear related to the idea of ​​identity, with reference to the initial state. Then the child becomes able to concentrate on the original equalization operation and makes a key discovery: “But at first it was poured the same way, so then it will be the same.”

So, thinking develops from concrete images to concepts denoted by a word. The images and ideas of different people are individual. Varying greatly, they do not provide reliable mutual understanding. This explains why adults cannot reach a high level of mutual understanding when communicating with children who are at the level of pre-conceptual thinking.

Concepts are common names by which a person calls a whole set of things. Therefore, they already coincide in content with different people to a much greater extent, which leads to easier mutual understanding. Thanks to the reversibility of logical operations inherent in conceptual thinking, instead of the operation of transduction (movement from the particular to the particular), two new operations become available to the child: movement from the particular to the general and vice versa with the help of induction and deduction.

Simultaneously with the child's overcoming of the limitations of pre-conceptual thinking, operations develop. First, operations are formed as structures of external material actions, then as specific operations, i.e., systems of actions performed already in the mind, but still based on direct perception, after which internal structures of formal operations, logic and conceptual thinking arise. The applied operations limit the level of ideas available to the child about space and time, causality and chance, quantity and movement. The development of operations leads to the emergence of such an important element of conceptual thinking as inference. Teachers gradually develop children's ability for verbal-logical thinking, reasoning, conclusions and conclusions. If first-graders and second-graders usually replace argument and proof by simply pointing to real fact or rely on analogy, then third-grade students, under the influence of training, are already able to give a reasonable proof, expand the argument, build the simplest deductive conclusion.

4. DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION, MEMORY AND IMAGINATION IN CHILDREN OF JUNIOR SCHOOL AGE

4.1. Attention

Attention selects relevant, personally significant signals from the set of all available to perception and, by limiting the field of perception, ensures concentration in this moment time on any object (subject, event, image, reasoning). Attention is the simplest form of self-deepening, through which the special is achieved. _ .standing: the contemplated object or thought begins to occupy the entire field of consciousness as a whole, displacing everything else from it. This ensures the stability of the process and creates optimal conditions for processing this object or thought “here and now”.

Educational activity requires a good development of voluntary attention. The child must be able to concentrate on a learning task, maintain intense (concentrated) attention on it for a long time, switch at a certain speed, flexibly moving from one task to another. However, the arbitrariness of cognitive processes in children of 6-8 and 9-11 years of age occurs only at the peak of volitional effort, when the child specially organizes himself under the pressure of circumstances or on his own impulse. Under normal circumstances, it is still difficult for him to organize his mental activity in this way. The age feature of younger schoolchildren is the relative weakness of voluntary attention. Their involuntary attention is much better developed. Everything new, unexpected, bright, interesting in itself attracts the attention of students without any effort on their part. Children may miss essential details in learning material and pay attention to non-essential ones just because they attract attention. In addition to the predominance of involuntary attention, its relatively low stability also belongs to the age feature. First-graders and, to some extent, second-graders still do not know how to concentrate on work for a long time, especially if it is uninteresting and monotonous; their attention is easily distracted. As a result, children may not complete the task on time, lose the pace and rhythm of activities, skip letters in a word and words in a sentence. Only by the third grade can attention be maintained continuously throughout the entire lesson.

Weakness of voluntary attention is one of the main reasons school difficulties: academic failure and poor discipline. In this regard, it is important to consider how this type of attention is formed and with the help of what methods it can be developed and corrected. It is shown that, unlike involuntary attention, voluntary attention is not a product of the maturation of the organism, but the result of a child's communication with adults and is formed in social contact. When the mother names an object and points to it to the child, thereby highlighting it from the environment, attention is restructured. It ceases to respond only to the natural orienting reactions of the child, which are controlled either by novelty or by the strength of the stimulus, and begins to obey the speech or gesture of the adult interacting with him.

For example, a child who is learning to write first moves his whole arm, eyes, head, part of his body, and tongue. Training consists in strengthening only one part of the movements, coordinating them into groups and eliminating unnecessary movements. Arbitrary attention is directed to the inhibition of unnecessary movements.

In its development, voluntary attention goes through certain stages. Exploring the environment, the child at first singles out only a number of furnishings. Then he gives a holistic description of the situation and, finally, an interpretation of what happened. At the same time, at first, the development of voluntary attention in children ensures the realization of only those goals that adults set for them, and then those that are set by the children themselves.

The development of the stability of voluntary attention is studied by determining the maximum time that children can spend concentrating on one game. If the maximum duration of one game for a six-month-old child is only 14 minutes, then by the age of 6-7 it increases to 1.5-3 hours. Just as long, the child can be focused on productive activities (drawing, designing, making crafts). However, such results of focusing attention are achievable only if there is interest in this activity. The child will languish, be distracted and feel completely unhappy if it is necessary to be attentive to those activities that he is indifferent to or does not like at all. The concentration of attention develops in the same way. If at 3 years old in 10 minutes of the game the child is distracted from it on average 4 times, then at 6 years old - only once.

This is one of the key indicators of a child's readiness for schooling.

In the early phases of development, voluntary attention is divided between two people - an adult and a child. An adult singles out an object from the environment by pointing to it with a gesture or a word; the child responds to this signal by fixing the named object with his eyes or by picking it up. Pointing to an object with a gesture or word organizes the child's attention, forcibly changing its direction. Thus, the given object stands out for the child from the external field. When a child develops his own speech, he can name the object himself and, thus, arbitrarily distinguish it from the rest of the environment. The function of analyzing the environment, which was previously divided between an adult and a child, becomes internal for the child and is performed by him independently. From what has been said it is clear how closely voluntary attention is connected with speech. At first, it manifests itself in the subordination of one’s behavior to the verbal instructions of adults (“Children, open notebooks!”), And then in the subordination of one’s behavior to one’s own verbal instructions. The last provision is very clearly illustrated by the famous poem by S. Mikhalkov “The cow gives milk”: It is not easy to write beautifully:

“Yes-et ko-ro-wa mo-lo-ko!” A letter follows a letter, a syllable follows a syllable. Well, at least someone could help!

One more page out! And outside the window from all sides: And the sound of the ball, and the barking of a puppy, And the ringing of some kind of bell,

And I'm sitting, looking in a notebook

I draw a letter after the letter: “Yes, ko-ro-va mo-lo-ko” ... Yes! Becoming a scientist is not easy!

The essence of the influence of a verbal instruction on the organization of voluntary attention is that it not only singles out an object from the environment, but also creates the opportunity to prolong the state of activation of traces, to prevent their premature extinction. By organizing a special activity with signals (for example, counting them), the verbal prescription introduces a factor of novelty and thereby helps to keep the object in the field of attention until the action with it is completed, i.e., maintaining control over the ongoing action. This essential role of attention is emphasized in the concept of P. Ya. Galperin.

Voluntary attention is fully developed by the age of 12-16. Thus, despite some ability of children primary school arbitrarily control their behavior, involuntary attention still prevails in them. Because of this, it is difficult for younger students to focus on monotonous and unattractive work for them or on work that is interesting, but requires mental effort. This leads to the need to include elements of the game in the learning process and quite often change the forms of activity.

4.2. Memory

Memory is the process of capturing, preserving and reproducing traces of past experience. In preschoolers, memory is considered the leading mental process. At this age, memorization occurs mainly involuntarily, which is due to an underdeveloped ability to comprehend the material, less ability to use associations, and insufficient experience and unfamiliarity with memorization techniques. If the events had emotional significance for the child and made an impression on him, involuntary memorization characterized by exceptional precision and stability. It is known that preschool children easily memorize meaningless material (for example, counting rhymes) or objectively meaningful, but insufficiently understood or completely incomprehensible words, phrases, poems. The reasons underlying such memorization are the interest that is aroused in children by the sound side of this material, a special emotional attitude towards it, inclusion in gaming activities. In addition, the very incomprehensibility of information can stimulate the child's curiosity and draw special attention to it. Preschool age is considered a period that frees children from the amnesia of infancy and early childhood. The preschooler's memory already stores representations that are interpreted as "generalized memories". According to L. S. Vygotsky, such “generalized memories” are capable of tearing the subject of thought out of the specific temporal and spatial situation in which it is included, and establishing a connection between general ideas of such an order that the child’s experience did not yet exist.

The leading types of memory in younger students are emotional and figurative. Children quickly and firmly remember everything bright, interesting, everything that causes an emotional response. At the same time, emotional memory is not always accompanied by an attitude to a revived feeling, as to a memory of something previously experienced. So, a child frightened by a dentist or a school principal is frightened at every meeting with them, but does not always realize what this feeling is connected with, since arbitrary reproduction of feelings is almost impossible. Thus, despite the fact that emotional memory provides a quick and durable memorization of information, it is not always possible to rely on the accuracy of its storage. Moreover, if in ordinary, calm conditions, an increase in the strength and brightness of an impression increases the clarity and strength of memorization, then in extreme situations (for example, on a control) a strong shock weakens or even completely drowns out what was reproduced.

Figurative memory also has its limitations. Children, indeed, better retain in memory specific persons, objects and events than definitions, descriptions, explanations. However, during the period of retention in memory, the image may undergo a certain transformation. Typical changes that occur with the visual image in the process of its storage are: simplification (omitting details), some exaggeration of individual elements, leading to the transformation of the figure and its transformation into a more uniform one.

Thus, images that include an emotional component are most reliably reproduced: unexpected and rarely encountered. Once we invited the children to make drawings on the topic: "So interesting, that it's even amazing." Attention was drawn to an "unexpected", from our point of view, and really one-of-a-kind plot: "The cat ate cockroaches." However, the answer of the first-grader to the question: “What is so surprising here?”, given in a neutral tone, turned out to be even more unexpected for us. The girl was literally "indignant" at the misunderstanding of adults: "But it's indecent - there are cockroaches!"

When we note the good figurative memory of children, we must keep in mind that figurative memory (both visual and auditory) is difficult to voluntarily control, and remembering clearly only the special, extraordinary does not mean having a good memory. Good memory is traditionally associated with memory for words, and when memorizing verbal information in younger students, especially in the first two grades, there is a tendency to mechanical imprinting, without awareness of the semantic connections within the memorized material. This is due to the common way in which student efforts are assessed. The reproduction of the educational task close to the text, from the point of view of adults, indicates the conscientious performance of homework by children and is usually rated with a high score. This encourages the child to answer as close to the text as possible. In addition, children still do not know how to use different methods of generalization. Not owning a detailed speech, children still cannot freely, in their own words, express the content of what they have read. Therefore, fearing to admit inaccuracy, they resort to literal reproduction.

The main direction of memory development in primary school age is the stimulation of verbal-logical memorization. Verbal-logical (symbolic) memory is divided into verbal and logical. Verbal memory is associated with speech and is fully formed only by the age of 10-13. Its distinguishing features are fidelity and great dependence on the will. A feature of logical memory is memorizing only the meaning of the text. In the process of its isolation, information is processed in more generalized terms, so logical memory is most closely connected with thinking. One of the methods of logical memorization is the semantic grouping of material in the process of memorization. Younger schoolchildren do not yet resort to this technique on their own, because they still do not analyze the text well, they do not know how to single out the main and essential. However, if children are specially taught the semantic grouping of the text, then even first-graders will be able to successfully cope with this task.

Gradually, arbitrary memory becomes the function on which all the educational activity of the child is based. Its advantages are in reliability and reduction in the number of errors during playback. It relies on the creation of an attitude towards memorization, i.e., on a change in the motivation for this activity. Active motivation, as well as an attitude that refines activity, put voluntary memorization in a more favorable position compared to involuntary. The teacher organizes the installation, gives the child instructions on how to remember and reproduce what should be learned. Together with the children, he discusses the content and volume of the material, distributes it into parts (in terms of meaning, according to the difficulty of memorization), teaches to control the process of memorization, reinforces it. A necessary condition for memorization is understanding - the teacher fixes the child's attention on the need to understand what needs to be remembered, gives the motivation for memorization: to remember in order to preserve knowledge, to acquire skills not only for solving school tasks, but for the rest of life.

4.3. Imagination

Imagination is the process of transforming images in memory in order to create new ones that have never been perceived by a person before. In a child, the imagination is formed in the game and at first is inseparable from the perception of objects and the performance of game actions with them. In children of 6-7 years of age, the imagination can already rely on such objects that are not at all similar to the ones being replaced. Parents and, especially, grandparents, who love to give their grandchildren big bears and huge dolls, often unwittingly hinder their development. They deprive them of the joy of independent discoveries in games. Most children do not like very naturalistic toys, preferring symbolic, home-made, imaginative toys. Children, as a rule, like small and inexpressive toys - they are easier to adapt to different games. Large or “just like real” dolls and animals do little to stimulate the imagination. Children develop more intensively and get much more pleasure if the same stick plays the role of a gun, the role of a horse, and many other functions in various games. L. Kassil's book "Konduit and Shvambrania" gives a vivid description of the attitude of children to toys: "Turned lacquered figures represented unlimited possibilities for using them for the most diverse and tempting games ... Both queens were especially comfortable: the blonde and the brunette. Each queen could work for a Christmas tree, a cab driver, a Chinese pagoda, a flower pot on a stand, and a bishop.”

Gradually, the need for an external support (even in a symbolic figure) disappears and internalization occurs - a transition to a game action with an object that does not really exist, to a game transformation of an object, to giving it a new meaning and representing actions with it in the mind, without real action. This is the origin of imagination as a special mental process.

A feature of the imagination of younger schoolchildren, manifested in educational activities, at first is also a reliance on perception (primary image), and not on representation (secondary image). For example, a teacher offers a task to children in a lesson that requires them to imagine a situation. It can be such a task: “A barge was sailing along the Volga and carried in holds ... kg of watermelons. There was pitching, and ... kg of watermelons burst. How many watermelons are left? Of course, such tasks start the process of imagination, but they need special tools (real objects, graphic images, layouts, diagrams), otherwise the child finds it difficult to advance in arbitrary actions of the imagination. In order to understand what happened in the watermelon holds, it is useful to give a sectional drawing of a barge.

In lessons with children, children are often offered tasks to develop their imagination. However, the material used in educational process, must be applied in a strictly specified way. For example, with the help of numbers, we suggest imagining anything. To do this, it is enough to ask the children the question: “What does the unit look like?”. And immediately get answers: “On a person who gives flowers”, “On a crocodile standing on its hind legs”. And also - on a springboard, an airplane, a giraffe, a snake ... This task gives children the opportunity to see that the same numbers can be very strict, obeying mathematical rules (the line “must”, “the same for everyone”, “correct” ), and at the same time alive, creating their own possibilities (the line “I want”, “not like everyone else”, “great”). Such games with numbers or other educational material not only stimulate the development of the imagination, but also serve as a kind of bridge between two types of thinking, abstract-logical and figurative.

The most vivid and free manifestation of the imagination of younger students can be observed in the game, in drawing, writing stories and fairy tales. In children's creativity, the manifestations of the imagination are diverse: some recreate reality, others create new fantastic images and situations. When writing stories, children can borrow plots known to them, stanzas of poems, graphic images, sometimes without noticing it at all. However, they often deliberately combine well-known plots, create new images, exaggerating certain aspects and qualities of their characters. The tireless work of the imagination is an effective way for a child to learn and assimilate the world around him, an opportunity to go beyond personal practical experience, the most important psychological prerequisite for the development of a creative approach to the world. Often the activity of the imagination underlies the formation personal qualities relevant to a particular child. A. Barto's poem "On the way to class" serves as an excellent illustration of this last provision:

Nikita hurried to the lesson. Walked without slowing down. Suddenly a puppy growls at him, a Curly mongrel.

Nikita is an adult! He is not a coward! But Tanyusha was walking nearby, She said: - Oh, I'm afraid!

And immediately tears hail.

But then Nikita saved her, He showed courage, Said: - Go quietly to class! - And drove the mongrel away.

His Tanya along the way Thanks for the courage. Once again, Nikita wanted to save her.

You can drown in the river! Get lost sometime! -

Nikita offered her.

I won't let you go down!

I won't drown myself!

She responds angrily.

She didn't understand him... But that's not the point! He all the way to the corner Saved Tanyusha boldly.

In her dreams, he saved her from a wolf ... But then the guys came to the class.

Often in their imagination, children create dangerous, scary situations. Experiencing negative tension in the process of creating and deploying images of the imagination, managing the plot, interrupting images and returning to them not only trains the child’s imagination as an arbitrary creative activity, but also contains a therapeutic effect. At the same time, experiencing difficulties in real life, children can go into an imaginary world as a defense, expressing doubts and feelings in dreams and fantasies.

G. L. Bardier makes the following observation. Children drew on the theme "I am happy, I am satisfied." Lyuba (8 years old) named her drawing like this: “They bring me a box for my birthday. And her dad is in it. And around - the sky with the stars. Apparently, in this case, the girl's dissatisfaction with her relationship with her father, whom she associates with a very desirable and happy gift, is manifested through a childish fantasy.

5. DEVELOPMENT OF PERCEPTION IN CHILDREN OF PRIMARY SCHOOL AGE

Perception is a form of holistic reflection of objects and phenomena with their direct impact on the senses. The basis of its formation as the highest mental function is active movement. It is perception that is most associated with the transformation of information coming from the external environment. As a result, mental images are formed, which are subsequently operated by attention, memory, representation, imagination, thinking, emotions. Due to the connections formed between different analyzers during perception, mental images reflect such properties of objects and phenomena for which there are no specific analyzers, for example, size, weight, shape, regularity, which indicates the complex organization of this mental process. Unlike the simplest mental process - sensations - perception depends not only on the stimulus, but also on the perceiving subject himself (it is not the eye that perceives, but a living person), therefore, the characteristics of the perceiver's personality necessarily affect perception. It follows that the external environment is perceived by us from the point of view of our needs, interests, under the pressure of the need to choose an adequate form of behavior. It can be said that perception is a system of perceptual actions that is formed in vivo, with the help of which children build an image of the surrounding reality and then orient themselves in it. Thus, the familiar world is only a description, a program of perception, which is laid in the human mind from childhood. The child perceives the world in accordance with the description formed in his mind, and these descriptions and their interpretations may be partially erroneous.

The most important properties of perception are objectivity, integrity, constancy and generalization. Objectivity is the relation of perception to the displayed object, the ability to distinguish an object from the surrounding background as a single thing. Integrity - the organic relationship of parts and the whole in the image. Constancy - the relative independence of the image from the physical conditions of perception, manifested in its immutability. Generalization - the relation of each image to a certain class of objects that have a name. All these properties are not innate and develop throughout a person's life.

Let's give some examples. In a small child, the objects surrounding him do not retain constant characteristics, i.e., the constancy of size, weight, volume. Thus, in a 2-3-year-old child, the constancy of perception is still very imperfect: the perceived dimensions of objects decrease with their distance, but by the age of 10 they are set at the level of an adult. Objectivity in him is also still weakly expressed, since the child does not distinguish himself well from the environment, he is, as it were, merged with the world of external objects. Piaget's position on this issue is interesting. He believes that the constancy of the perception of size and distance develops and reaches a high level already during infancy, but only in relation to the near space in which the child directly acts. Far space in infancy and childhood is perceived non-constantly due to the lack of one's own experience in this environment.

In younger students, perception is already well developed. They not only distinguish the color, shape, size of objects and their position in space, but they can also correctly name the proposed shapes and colors, and correctly correlate objects by their size. They can draw the simplest shapes and paint them in a given color. However, in the first and at the beginning of the second grade, perception is still very imperfect and superficial. Children make inaccuracies and errors in differentiation when perceiving similar objects. Sometimes they do not distinguish and mix letters and words similar in style and pronunciation, images of similar objects and similar objects themselves. Often random details are singled out, but the essential and important are not perceived. Thus, they still do not know how to consider objects well. Another feature of the perception of younger students is its close connection with actions. For a younger student, to perceive an object means to do something with it, somehow change it, take it, touch it. At the same time, his perception is sharp and fresh, a kind of contemplative curiosity.

Very accurately, such features of the perception of children can be traced in the poem by A. Barto "I asked the boys ...":

I asked the boys

What is this tree?

They say: - Aspen.

Only I can't believe it.

At first, we didn’t even distinguish Christmas trees From pines: Once the needles stick out, It means that these are Christmas trees.

And when we ate on the branch We looked better, It turned out that it was not like a pine tree.

We will draw all the sheets in our blue notebook And we will not say about the aspen: “Oh, birch, it's you!”.

It is very important that children at this age be able to establish the identity of objects to one or another standard. This skill is not always seen. In nature, there is an infinite variety of colors, shapes and sounds, and humanity has only gradually streamlined them, reducing them to sensory standards - systems of colors, shapes, sounds. Standards are samples of the main varieties of qualities and properties of objects developed by mankind. If the child can correctly name the color and shape of the object, if he can correlate the perceived quality with the standard, then he can establish identity (the ball is round), partial similarity (the apple is round, but not as much as the ball) and dissimilarity (ball and cube).

In the proposed scheme for diagnosing the psychological readiness of children for school, attention is paid to assessing the perceptual development of the child. It is known that the slowness of the processes of reception and processing of sensory information, the inferiority of spatial orientation, insufficient mastery of the image of the word often leads to a delay in mental development in children. Using a modification of O. M. Dyachenko’s “Artist” test, we ask children to complete eight similar figures depicted on a sheet of paper so that they do not get the same drawings. After completing the drawing, the child needs to give the pictures names, that is, perceive the images that he drew and correlate them with some class of objects stored in memory (with a standard), and then designate his images with words. Practice shows that about a third of children of 6-7 years old who are selected for the first grade experience difficulties in verbalization, give stereotypical names or cannot give a name to their own drawing at all, that is, correlate it with the standards stored in memory. These problems are more common in boys.

Already from the facts cited above, it can be seen that such a property of perception as generalization is still imperfect in many children. At that

At the same time, it is generalization that predetermines the formation of other mental cognitive processes - memory, representation, speech, thinking. Generalization connects the individual and social experience of a person, providing semantic constancy. Unfortunately, the operations of generalization and classification in children of this age are still at the stage of formation, which can affect not only the academic performance of the child, but also his ability to assimilate the norms and requirements of adults. Even when perceived, they may remain inaccessible in their meaning.

CONCLUSION:

Main Feature The development of the cognitive sphere of children of primary school age is the transition of the mental cognitive processes of the child to a higher level. This, first of all, is expressed in the more arbitrary nature of the course of most mental processes (perception, attention, memory, ideas), as well as in the formation of abstract-logical forms of thinking in the child and teaching him written speech.

In the process of teaching a child in the primary grades, when he has a rapid development of mental cognitive processes, it is desirable to control the features of the formation of the child's cognitive sphere. To solve these problems, teachers can very successfully use psychological methods, especially since the level of mental development of the child already allows the use of a very significant number of test methods.

Bibliography:

1. Psychology of childhood. Textbook. Under the editorship of RAO Corresponding Member A. A. Rean - St. Petersburg: "Prime-EURO-SIGN", 2003. - 368 p.

2. L.F. Obukhova. Child psychology: theories, facts, problems. - M. 1996. 351 p.

3. J. Piaget. Selected psychological works. M, 1969.

4. Ivashchenko F. I. "Work and development of the student's personality." M. Enlightenment. 1994.

5. Konovalenko, SV. The development of cognitive activity in children from 6 to 9 years. - M., 1998.

6. I.M. Nikolskaya R.M. Granovskaya "Psychological protection in children"

The main changes in the cognitive sphere of the younger student are the transition from involuntary to voluntary activity.

The development of perception. Children come to school with sufficiently developed perception processes - they distinguish between shapes, colors, and sounds of speech. But they still cannot conduct a systematic analysis of the properties and qualities of an object; they must master the means of such an analysis.

Thinking: the transition from concrete-figurative to verbal-logical and reasoning thinking. The development of mental operations (analysis, comparison, etc.), the formation of scientific concepts. The emergence of intellectual reflection as the beginning of the development of theoretical thinking.

Attention, memory, perception: spontaneous and / or controlled formation of arbitrariness, self-organization and meaningfulness of mental processes. Increasing the role of thinking, the formation of logical memory, detailed perception, recreating imagination.

Imagination. Until the age of seven, children can only find reproductive images-representations of known objects or events that are not perceived at a given moment in time, and these images are mostly static. Productive image-representations as a new combination of familiar elements appear in children after the age of 7-8, and the development of these images is probably associated with the beginning of schooling.

Perception. At the beginning of primary school age, perception is not sufficiently differentiated. Because of this, the child sometimes confuses letters and numbers that are similar in spelling (for example, 9 and 6). A child can purposefully examine objects and drawings, but at the same time, as in preschool age, they are distinguished by the most striking, “conspicuous” properties - mainly color, shape and size. If preschoolers were characterized by analyzing perception, then by the end of primary school age, with appropriate training, a synthesizing perception appears. The developing intellect makes it possible to establish connections between the elements of the perceived.

Memory. Memory in primary school age develops in two directions - arbitrariness and meaningfulness. Children involuntarily memorize educational material that arouses their interest, presented in a playful way, associated with vivid visual aids or memory images, etc. But, unlike preschoolers, they are able to purposefully, arbitrarily memorize material that is not interesting to them. Every year, more and more training is based on arbitrary memory. The indirect, logical memory (or semantic memory) lags somewhat behind in its development, since in most cases the child, being busy with learning, work, play and communication, completely manages with mechanical memory.

Attention. Compared to preschoolers, younger students are much more attentive. They are already able to concentrate their attention on uninteresting actions; in educational activities, the child's voluntary attention develops. However, in younger students, involuntary attention still prevails. For them, external impressions are a strong distraction, it is difficult for them to concentrate on incomprehensible complex material. Differs in small volume, low stability - they can focus on one thing for 10-20 minutes (while teenagers - 40-45 minutes, and high school students - up to 45-50 minutes). The distribution of attention and its switching from one educational task to another are difficult.

Thinking. Thinking becomes the dominant function in primary school age. The development of other mental functions depends on the intellect. During the first three or four years of schooling, progress in the mental development of children can be quite noticeable. From the dominance of visual-effective and elementary figurative thinking, from pre-conceptual thinking, the student rises to verbal-logical thinking at the level of specific concepts. According to the terminology of J. Piaget, the beginning of this age is associated with the dominance of pre-operational thinking, and the end - with the predominance of operational thinking in concepts. Mastering the system of scientific concepts makes it possible to talk about the development of the fundamentals of conceptual or theoretical thinking in younger students. Theoretical thinking allows the student to solve problems, focusing not on external, visual signs and connections of objects, but on internal, essential properties and relationships. The development of theoretical thinking depends on how and what the child is taught, i.e. on the type of training.

Interests of modern junior schoolchildren

Of the activities in preschool age, the greatest interest in children is the game. This interest is retained to a large extent among younger students. But even before entering school, as already noted, children have an interest in learning. All of them are looking forward to the moment when they will go to the "first time in the first class." At the same time, at first their interest in learning extends to many things, it has a diffuse, scattered character.

Children are interested in everything at school: they like to listen to the teacher, raise their hand, stand up and answer questions, read aloud, write in notebooks, get marks. But gradually the interests are refined, differentiated (dismembered). Some activities children tend to do more than others. Likes and dislikes appear.

Already in the second grade, it is noticeable that some children like to read aloud and talk more, others are interested in counting and solving problems, some prefer to draw or do physical education. In the third grade, this selective interest in academic subjects becomes even more noticeable and manifests itself in extracurricular activities. Children begin, on their own initiative and of their own choice, to read certain fiction or popular literature.

At the same time, these interests are becoming deeper. If in the first and the beginning of the second grade children are mainly interested in facts, events, story plots, then from the end of the second year of study they are no less interested in explaining these facts, their reasons. In one of the experiments, children in grades I, II, III and IV were read two stories: the first one provided interesting information about the life of animals, the second described and explained the manufacture of silk fabric. It turned out that the older children liked the second story more. This suggests that with age, the interests of schoolchildren not only expand, but are also caused by more complex phenomena.

1. The thinking of a child of primary school age is at a turning point in development. During this period, a transition is made from visual-figurative to verbal-logical, conceptual thinking, which gives the child’s mental activity a dual character: concrete thinking, associated with reality and direct observation, already obeys logical principles, but abstract, formal-logical reasoning for children is still not available. At this age, the child's thinking is closely related to his personal experience.

2. attention is still poorly organized, has a small volume, is poorly distributed, unstable, which is largely due to the insufficient maturity of the neurophysiological mechanisms that ensure the processes of attention. the amount of attention increases, its stability increases, switching and distribution skills develop.

3. The child’s memory gradually acquires the features of arbitrariness, becoming consciously regulated. The first-grader has a well-developed involuntary memory that captures vivid, emotionally rich information and events of his life for the child. interest in knowledge, in individual subjects, the development of a positive attitude towards them. Improving memory in primary school age is primarily due to the acquisition in the course of educational activities of various methods and strategies of memorization related to the organization and processing of memorized material.

4. The junior schoolchild has a sufficient level of perception development: he has a high level of visual acuity, hearing, orientation to the shape and color of an object. It is necessary to teach to focus their attention on the subjects of educational activity, regardless of their external attractiveness. All this leads to the development of arbitrariness, meaningfulness, and at the same time to a different selectivity of perception: selectivity in content, and not in external attractiveness. By the end of grade 1, the student is able to perceive objects in accordance with the needs and interests that arise in the learning process, and his past experience.

5. changes occur in the development of the imagination of a younger student: at first, the images of the imagination in children are vague, unclear, but then they become more accurate and definite; at first, only a few features are displayed in the image, and insignificant ones predominate among them, and by the second, third class, the number of displayed features increases significantly.

6. with the help of language and speech, the child's thinking is formed, the structure of his consciousness is determined. The very formulation of thought in verbal form provides a better understanding of the object of knowledge. Since speech is an activity, it is necessary to teach speech as an activity. Therefore, it is correct to set a topic, to interest it, to arouse a desire to take part in its discussion, to intensify the work of schoolchildren.

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