WHY DON’T FIRST GRADERS WANT TO LEARN OR WHEN THE TEACHER IS POWERLESS?

Very often worried parents of first graders apply to the Children’s Psychological Center – the child does not want to study and learn what are some even numbers is, does not listen to the teacher, plays at lessons, everybody laughs at him, does homework with scandals, in the end the teacher offers to go to home school… At the same time in kindergarten the child was successful, visited development centers, started reading and writing almost at age 5, passed pre-school training. Everything was good, and then suddenly everything went wrong at school.

What happens and why is the teacher often powerless in such situations?

If the results of diagnostics and information from parents indicate normal mental development of the child, specialists start searching for the cause of such behavior.

There are several variants:

– the child’s role as a pupil is not formed, because the mechanisms of role behavior are not worked out (he talks to the teacher as an equal, does not listen and does not comply with the teacher’s requirements, does what he wants in class, gets up, leaves, crawls around the classroom, gets angry at home, cries, is capricious when doing homework)
– the motivational and demand sphere is not developed or needs psychological correction (plays with toys during lessons, involves classmates in the game, does homework https://argoprep.com/worksheet-sets/letter-tracing/ only with parents and only after long persuasion, talks to peers only about games, does not like to talk about school, resists demands for independent behavior in school matters)
– the willful self-regulation of the first grader is not developed (the child starts to do everything together with the others, but drops it, or does it as if it was in the wrong place, because of this the child quickly stops being successful, because there is no learning new things and improvement of abilities and skills; he or she promises but can’t do them; takes on several tasks at once because everything is interesting; remembers only what attracts attention; parents have to do everything together with the child and instead of him or her, the child gets very upset and cries in response to criticism and demands; usually such behavior leads to neurosis

Precisely these problems make the child unsuccessful in the role of a first-grader, and his/her learning is ineffective in such conditions: you can teach a child to learn only if he/she easily fulfills the role of a pupil, understands why it is necessary to learn and it is very important and significant for him/her, makes volitionalefforts to control his/her desires, emotions and his/her learning.

Note that parents play a major role in the formation of learning motivation. Imagine a picture: the child was bought a bicycle and sent to a competition, offered and forced to ride a bicycle to the finish line, the child wants to, but he is not able to pedal with his feet, he can’t keep his balance. He’s going to fall. It’s good if he doesn’t crash, but he won’t win the competition. And then he will be scolded for failing to do so. To avoid this, children come up with different ways: someone throws his bike and runs himself. He is told, “No, the rules and conditions didn’t hold up!” Then the child takes the bike and runs with it. But again he doesn’t get the result he wants. At best, the child will say, “I can’t, teach me!” But in most cases, he or she will be offended at first, and then stop trying.

It is clear from the example that first of all we need to teach the child to pedal. Here and in learning – the psychological readiness of the child is just as important to the success of the first-grader.

Parents are perplexed, “We developed the child everywhere, why did this happen?” Most likely, the reason is that there was training of the child, and not development of his personal qualities and adaptive mechanisms.

Often parents want to get counseling from a psychologist, and they are going to help the child themselves. But, unfortunately, they will not succeed on their own. After all, they have already brought up their child up to the age of seven, but they have not formed important qualities. For different reasons: someone did not give enough time to the child, someone simply does not know how to bring up children (know how to love and pamper).

But even without parents, it is not possible to achieve the desired result. Only in close cooperation with psychologists, parents, and teacher will help the first grader get interested in learning and become successful at school.