The youngest school age in modern psychology covers the period of a child's life from 6-7 years to 10-11 years. The most characteristic feature of this period is that at this age a preschooler becomes a schoolchild. This is a transition period, when the child combines the features of preschool childhood with the features of a schoolboy. These qualities get along in his behavior and consciousness in the form of complex and sometimes contradictory combinations. As with any transition state, this age is rich in hidden development opportunities, which are important to catch and maintain in a timely manner. The foundations of many mental qualities are laid and cultivated in the younger school age. Therefore, special attention of scientists is now directed to the identification of reserves for the development of junior schoolchildren. The use of these reserves will make it possible to prepare children for further educational and employment activities more successfully.
The development of the psyche of younger schoolchildren is mainly based on their learning activities. Including in the educational work, children gradually submit to its requirements, and the fulfillment of these requirements requires the appearance of new qualities of the psyche, which are absent in preschool children. New qualities emerge and develop in younger pupils as they develop their learning activities.
When performing certain tasks in different subjects, children usually find the best ways to solve them, choose and compare the variants of action, plan their order and means of implementation (this internal work is especially evident in the work classes). The more “steps” a child can envisage and the more carefully he or she can compare their different options, the more successfully he or she will be able to control the actual solution of the problem. The need for monitoring and self-monitoring in the learning activity, as well as a number of other features (e.g. verbal reporting requirements, assessment), create an enabling environment for young people to develop their own planning and implementation skills.
One of the most important requirements of the learning activity is that children have to explain in detail the fairness of their statements and actions. Many of the ways in which this is done are outlined by the teacher. The need to distinguish between patterns of reasoning and attempts to construct them on their own implies the development of the ability of younger students to view and evaluate their own thoughts and actions as if they were outside the classroom. This skill is the basis of reflection as an important quality that allows reasonable and objective analysis of one's own judgments and actions from the point of view of their compliance with the plan and conditions of activity.
Arbitrariness, internal plan of action, and reflexivity are the primary school-age child's main neoplasms. Thanks to them, the psyche of the younger schoolchild reaches the level of development necessary for further education in secondary school, for a normal transition to adolescence with its special capabilities and requirements. The unpreparedness of some younger students for secondary school is most often related to the lack of these general qualities and abilities of the individual, which determine the level of mental processes and learning activities.
The development of individual mental processes takes place throughout primary school age. Though children come to school with rather developed processes of perception (they have high visual and hearing acuity, they are well guided by different forms and colors), but their perception in educational activity is reduced only to recognition and naming of the form and color in first-graders there is no systematic analysis of the perceived properties and qualities of subjects.
A child's ability to analyze and differentiate perceived objects is related to the formation of a more complex type of activity than the feeling and discernment of certain immediate properties of things. This type of activity, called observation, is especially intense in the school learning process. In the classroom, the student receives and then formulates the tasks of perception of certain examples and manuals. In this way, the perception becomes purposeful. The teacher regularly shows the children the methods of inspection or listening to things and phenomena (the order of revealing their properties, routes of movement of hands and eyes, etc.). Such perception, synthesized with other types of cognitive activity (attention, thinking), takes the form of purposeful and arbitrary observation. With a sufficiently developed observation, we can talk about the observation of the child as a special quality of his personality. Studies show that in primary education it is possible to significantly develop this important quality in all younger students.