Named the best way to spend the New Year holidays

In addition, ordinary people, according to the established tradition of looking to the East, are waiting for the arrival of the Year of the Dragon, which, you see, cannot but cause concern, since the dragon is a fire-breathing creature with many heads. Only a few brave Lancelots can fight him.

Which, in fact, follows from the Chinese calendar: “The power of the Dragon can bring prosperity and good luck to strong, ambitious and courageous people.” What does the new year promise for everyone else?

Agree, everything is much calmer for teachers: The Year of the Teacher-Mentor smoothly develops into the Year of the Family. This does not mean that in the past year the whole country loved and praised teachers, and in the coming year, completely forgetting about teachers, will begin to glorify fathers and mothers. Not at all. After all, for a child, the first and most important teacher-mentors are his own parents. Over half a century of professional activity, I have become convinced that parental contribution to the upbringing and development of a child is the most precious.

St. Augustine, who paid great attention to the infancy period in a person’s life, rightly writes in his “Confessions”: “I grasped in my memory when adults named some thing and turned to it based on this word; I saw it and remembered: the sounded word is the name of exactly this thing. That the adults wanted to call her, this was evident from their gestures, from this natural language of all peoples, composed of facial expressions, winks, various body movements and sounds, expressing the state of the soul, which asks, receives, rejects, avoids. I gradually began to understand what the words that were in their place in different sentences and that I often heard were signs of. I forced my lips to cope with these signs and began to express my desires with them. Thus, in order to express my desires, I began to communicate with those among whom I lived with these signs; I entered deeper into the turbulent life of human society, depending on my parents’ orders and the will of my elders.” Think about it: it was written in the 5th century!

Today’s parents often, citing being too busy, neglect their responsibilities as a teacher-mentor, relying on kindergartens and schools, which, they say, will teach the child to read books and other useful things.

But how can one not recall the winged stanza of the poet Robert Rozhdestvensky: “Whether you want it or not, the point, comrades, is that first of all you are parents, and everything else comes later.”

As for the school, in the absence of appropriate parental training, it will be forced to resort to violence against the child. By the way, the same Blessed Augustine experienced this on his own skin, which was often subjected to corporal punishment at school. (In elite schools in Great Britain, corporal punishment was practiced until the seventies of the 20th century.) Hence his bitter remark: “If in my old age I was offered the dilemma of dying or rejuvenating and returning to school, I would prefer to die.” This is the deep reason why many adults remember school as a nightmare.

I admit that what has been said also applies to the author of these lines. I studied well, with B’s and A’s, but I was a terrible humanist. But still, in my declining years, I periodically wake up in a cold sweat, when in my dreams I see myself writing a written final work in mathematics, for which I received a “B”.

St. Augustine had no shortage of memory or abilities, but he loved to indulge in fairy-tale fantasies, replaying the plots of his favorite fairy tales in his head. For which he was punished by adults who themselves did the same thing: gladiator fights, theatrical mysteries and other entertainment.

In our twenty-first century, adults enthusiastically participate in various sports competitions, talk shows and lotteries… Which is quite natural, because the game is rooted in human nature. It is not for nothing that the outstanding psychologist Johan Huising wrote the book Homo Ludens (“Man at Play”).

But then why do adults, while indulging in gaming themselves, deny this right to a child?

Gentlemen, comrade parents, do not be lazy to read fairy tales to your little child at night. And since you do not have the ability to read expressively, take advantage of audiobooks, where the texts are read by recognized masters of words, and even with musical accompaniment.

You are going with your child to the dacha, where you will celebrate the New Year, turn on the “Radiobook” channel, where they read domestic and foreign classics, where there is a section “Forgotten Writers of Russia”. And the travel time will not be in vain for the child. Everything that is said will be “written down,” as I have seen more than once with children—my own and other people’s.

For example, a four-year-old child listened to “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. You say: it’s early. How to look… A young child has excellent phonemic memory. Having matured, the younger student, under the guidance of a teacher or parent, begins to read this book. And then it turns out that he remembers all the names of the planets, the names of the characters and other even the smallest details of the book.

Of course, a child is not able to rise to the heights of philosophical generalizations contained in this text. But great works are great because we repeatedly turn to reading them at different stages of our life’s journey.

An audiobook is not the only modern gadget that helps introduce a child to culture. Legislators who are far from the modern pedagogical process decided to exclude gadgets from the educational process. From their point of view, these tools distract children from their studies. There are plenty of examples refuting this archaic point of view. I will cite just one that the father of one student shared with me.

His son, suffering from a serious illness, was admitted to the Research Center named after. Dmitry Rogachev with a serious illness, where he is being prepared for surgery. But you can’t think only about the disease all the time and become depressed. A boy works with a tablet between medical procedures. I must say that his father is Russian, and his mother is Korean. So, with the help of a tablet, the boy successfully masters Russian, Korean and English. The success of mastering is due to the fact that the relevant courses are presented there in a playful form.

Let us again give the floor to St. Augustine: “There was a time when I, as a child, did not know a single word of Latin, but I learned it by ear, without any fear or torment, from nurses who joked and played with me, amidst gentle speech, fun and laughter. I learned it without painful and painful coercion, for my heart compelled me to give birth to what was conceived, and it was impossible to give birth if I had not learned, not in lessons, but in conversation, those words with which I conveyed to the ears of others what I thought. From this it is clear that free curiosity is much more important for learning a language than formidable necessity.” It is noteworthy that centuries later, the most modern methods of learning foreign languages ​​are based on live, free communication. We, with a tenacity worthy of better use, hammer into children dead grammar.

An equally universal means of introducing a child to culture in general and reading in particular is theatrical performance. Those parents who act out plays at home with their children act wisely. Why do adults and children create costumes and decorations? The long New Year holidays allow you to do this. Such home performances become bright events in a child’s life, and children’s impressions remain for life. In addition, modern gadgets make it possible to film performances that the whole family can enjoy watching years later.

Of course, it’s easier to give a little person a tablet and make him watch cartoons so that he doesn’t distract the adults from the copious libations at the holiday table. But then don’t be surprised that your child doesn’t want to read and will inevitably become a computer gamer with all the ensuing sad consequences.

Among other things, home performances and preliminary reading prepare children to perceive performances in adult theaters. By the way, in the wonderful theater of music and poetry of E. Kamburova there is a wonderful play “The Little Prince”. Tested by experience – even a six-year-old child, if he is previously prepared, eagerly listens to everything that happens on stage.

The conclusion is obvious. Comrade adults – parents, grandparents – dedicate the New Year holidays to your children and grandchildren. You can’t go wrong!