Portfolio of a first-grader: why is it needed and how is it useful?

Today’s chil­dren already from the school bench begin to com­pile their own port­fo­lio. Some par­ents wor­ry, try­ing to find answers to the ques­tions: “How?”, “Why?” and why?”. And real­ly, how can a first grader’s port­fo­lio affect a child’s future? Why is it need­ed? And why should we start tak­ing care of it so ear­ly?

When grad­u­at­ing from school or even uni­ver­si­ty, many young peo­ple come to a dif­fi­cult con­clu­sion: a huge num­ber of skills that are real­ly impor­tant in life, they have to learn lit­er­al­ly from scratch. After all, teach­ers didn’t tell us how to write a com­pet­i­tive resume, and in math class­es they didn’t teach us how to allo­cate finances. And if such applied skills can be learned from one’s own expe­ri­ence, then what to do with the inabil­i­ty to see one’s own mer­its in order to put them in the most favor­able light at the right time?

In 2011/12, new edu­ca­tion­al stan­dards were intro­duced in Russ­ian schools, which affect­ed not only pro­grams in var­i­ous sub­jects, but also such fac­tors as the devel­op­ment of cer­tain skills by chil­dren that can help them suc­cess­ful­ly gnaw out the gran­ite of sci­ence and in adult­hood. In par­tic­u­lar, a port­fo­lio of a first-grad­er appeared.

Nat­u­ral­ly, moms and dads had a lot of ques­tions: in addi­tion to the “tech­ni­cal” issues relat­ed to design and con­tent, these are ques­tions such as why do you need a port­fo­lio at such a young age? Will the intro­duc­tion of such an approach based on achieve­ments and, to some extent, com­pe­ti­tion, spoil the child’s nerves and psy­che?

Why is this needed?

For a child
It is worth not­ing that the port­fo­lio of a first-grad­er has sev­er­al undoubt­ed­ly pos­i­tive fac­tors behind it. First of all, it con­cerns the child him­self. Remem­ber the ped­a­gog­i­cal approach in schools 15, 20 and more years ago. It was often believed that crit­i­cism, the so-called “neg­a­tive rein­force­ment”, moti­vates chil­dren, caus­ing them to strive for bet­ter ful­fill­ment of goals and tasks. Today we have become more con­scious, infor­ma­tion about psy­chol­o­gy has become wide­ly avail­able, and we under­stand that if you edu­cate only with a “whip”, you can get psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma, iso­la­tion, the child’s con­fi­dence that he is doing every­thing wrong, and “the right way” — very dif­fi­cult and almost impos­si­ble to do.

There­fore, it is so impor­tant to form in a child the abil­i­ty to take a healthy look at their capa­bil­i­ties, respect their own tal­ents, struc­ture and devel­op them. And in many ways, this is exact­ly where the port­fo­lio works. It is a fold­er that stores all the mate­r­i­al evi­dence of the achieve­ments of the stu­dent: not only report cards, but also diplo­mas, cer­tifi­cates from dif­fer­ent cir­cles and sec­tions. By all this, the child can see with his own eyes the fruits of his work, what he is good at. After all, you see, suc­cess is inspir­ing.

For par­ents
Let’s think: to what extent does the child him­self under­stand the impor­tance of his own achieve­ments? Indeed, in the main, a com­pet­i­tive spir­it, aware­ness of the impor­tance of one’s achieve­ments appears over the years, devel­op­ing under the influ­ence of soci­ety. Parental assess­ments of cer­tain actions also influ­ence: praise for an A in math and crit­i­cism for unlearned home­work, for exam­ple.

Moms, dads, grand­par­ents often wor­ry about the suc­cess of a first-grad­er more than he does. This can lead to the fact that we need to embody our own ambi­tions in the kid: enroll him in ten cir­cles and be sure to be an excel­lent stu­dent. But does the child need it? More­over, usu­al­ly this is not enough: suc­cess pales against the back­drop of even rare fail­ures. Achieve­ments are tak­en for grant­ed, and fail­ures shine before the eyes in bright neon let­ters. The child reads our reac­tion, as a result of which he devel­ops a neu­ro­sis or back­ground anx­i­ety. Is this what par­ents real­ly want? Hard­ly.

The port­fo­lio of a first grad­er is a clear illus­tra­tion of the good that your child has already achieved, although he is only 7 or 8. Anx­ious moms and dads can look there when there are too many doubts and rejoice at how won­der­ful Vladik, Nas­ten­ka or Polinochka are. As a result, it is good for both par­ents and their lit­tle loved one.

Space for cre­ativ­i­ty
Anoth­er pos­i­tive aspect of com­pil­ing a first grader’s port­fo­lio is that, despite the strict name, the child can also embody his cre­ative poten­tial in it. Of course, there are cer­tain require­ments for com­pil­ing such a school port­fo­lio, but still a novice stu­dent can put a part of his per­son­al­i­ty and world­view into it, and this can make any work more inter­est­ing.

but on the other hand

Of course, you can see the dis­ad­van­tages behind the plus­es. For exam­ple, com­pe­ti­tion may arise between chil­dren over whose port­fo­lio is larg­er and whose mer­its are larg­er. But do not for­get that this is often a con­se­quence of parental words and assess­ments, which we have already talked about above.

Obvi­ous­ly, if we want to raise a bal­anced, inde­pen­dent and self-aware per­son, then we need to keep the atti­tude that the port­fo­lio is an extreme­ly pos­i­tive way to look at our­selves. “Look how much you can do, how much you have achieved!” That’s what a child needs to hear. At the same time, crit­i­cisms and com­par­isons of him with oth­er chil­dren are not the best top­ic for dis­cus­sion. After all, the only per­son we have to com­pete with is our­selves in the past. And it is very impor­tant to tell the child about it.