Psychological and pedagogical principles of teaching writing to six-year-old schoolchildren in a New Ukrainian School

Abstract

The article deals with the psychophysiological mechanisms of learning to write inherent in six-year-old children, which are scientific guidelines for improving the methods of teaching six-year-old first graders to write according to the requirements of the New Ukrainian School. It has been found that it is inexpedient to teach first-graders continuous, fast and calligraphic writing and to use the copying method of teaching. The focus should be on driving to automatism the skills of writing the letter elements and constructing letters from them, using speech and game teaching techniques. Regular difficulties that pupils face when learning to write have been defined. It has been concluded that the work on perfection of the skills necessary for writing and on automaticity of writing shall take up a considerable part of the Ukrainian language lessons through all the years in the elementary school, since writing skills, unlike reading skills, reach the level of automatism only at the end of the fourth learning year, when the child is 9 to 10 years old.