Method of teaching reading by Nikolai Zaitsev. Learning to read using Zaitsev's method step by step Zaitsev's tables and cubes

When choosing an early method of child development, parents pay special attention to systems that allow them to teach their children to read without any problems. According to reviews, today Zaitsev’s program is considered the most popular.

Zaitsev's method of teaching reading

Talented Russian teacher N.A. Zaitsev insists in his teaching methodology:

If necessary, use a warehouse system.
There is no need to explain for a long time - show it to your child.
Learning to read without problems and coercion is possible only with the help of games.
When working with 2-year-old children, cubes are used. Warehouses and individual letters are marked on the edges of the manual.
The teacher constantly pronounces the demonstrated material.
Zaitsev noted that children remember syllables well and easily compose words from them.
To speed up the process of perceiving information, children should sing chains of syllables.
You should learn to read systematically. Step-by-step work and regular lessons are considered optimal.
The manual consists of tables, cubes and stock pictures.

To achieve maximum effect when using Zaitsev's technique, it is necessary to create the right learning environment at home. It is advisable to purchase tables and cubes for games with the family. At the same time, it is important to keep the didactic material in working order and keep order in the nursery.

Zaitsev technology: reading

Let's take a look at what the manual for step-by-step reading according to Zaitsev's method is:

Cubes (52 pcs.). They consist of 7 repeating syllables, which children use to create their first simple words (MA MA, DYA DYA, PA PA and others). Products have different colors, weights and hardness.
Small cubes are soft warehouses - MY, LY and others.
Large ones - solid MA, LA, BA and others.
Iron-gold - warehouses with a soft sign.
Iron-wooden - with a solid sign.
Iron - calls warehouses.
Wooden ones are muted.
Golden - vowels.
For step-by-step lessons, tables, pictures and a playing field are used.
Demonstrative material is placed at a distance of 160-170 cm from the floor, so that during the lesson the preschooler looks up and tries to keep his back straight.
The optimally selected size of the letters allows you to see the material from a distance of 10 meters.

Before starting the lesson, carefully read the author's methodological recommendations and select a game. The lesson time must not exceed 20 minutes.

Learning process

The technique is based on using storage blocks in a fun game. Basic examples of conducting classes:

For the first lesson, just let the children play with the blocks.
Tell us about the sound of “gold”, “iron” and “wooden” products. Invite the children to sort the cubes according to sound.
Divide the products by volume - put all the small ones on one table, and the large ones on the second. Explain that small syllables are soft, like babies. And the big ones are hard because they are stronger.
Sing. Singing is required during lessons, which, according to Zaitsev, allows you to quickly learn to read.
Lesson algorithm. The cubes are sung, then the warehouses from the table and words are constructed.
Demonstration of syllables in pictures, cubes and tables allows children to view warehouses from different angles, which makes them easier to memorize.
Don't be afraid that the baby will get confused. The teaching technique allows you to quickly grasp the pattern of the language.
Turning the cube, the mentor clearly pronounces the warehouses.
Now let the baby work with the products.
After the preschooler has studied the cubes, invite him to show the products with a certain chant in the table.
Take the pointer and start chanting the warehouses on the table. The teacher is obliged to articulate and show that sounds are small or large, rustling or ringing. For clarity, you can squat or stand on your toes.

Reading according to Zaitsev’s method will be effective only if you strictly follow the author’s recommendations.

Results of using the technique

According to teachers who use Nikolai Alexandrovich’s technology, the following statistics were compiled:

Children aged three years begin to read six months after the start of step-by-step instruction.
At 4 years old, 16 lessons are enough.
5 years - from 5 to 10 lessons.
6 years - reading mastered in 4-6 lessons.

The children who began studying using this method at the age of three knew the 5th grade curriculum of a general education school by the time they entered the first grade.

Buzz reading according to Zaitsev's method

Parents and teachers highlight the following advantages:

The little man sees and hears warehouses, which helps improve figurative memory.
It's fun and interesting for the little one.
Mistakes when writing words are not allowed. The set does not contain CHYA and ZHY.
Children learn to read from the first lessons.
The work involves vision, hearing and fine motor skills.
Development of the speech apparatus.
An understanding of the differences between voiceless and voiced consonants quickly comes.
During classes, the child is not nervous, because even from a distance of 2 meters he can find the required element.
The lessons do not put pressure on the psyche.

Reading allows a little person to develop harmoniously from an early age.

Everyone knows Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zaitsev for his famous cubes, which are used in kindergartens, elementary schools, development centers and at home. But the teaching method of this Russian teacher and educator is much deeper. It involves not only rapid learning of reading, counting, writing, literacy, foreign languages, mathematics, anatomy, geography, ecology, music, but also gives a powerful impetus to the child’s self-development. Its healing effect, high effectiveness and humanity have been confirmed by practice.

Biography

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zaitsev was born in 1939 in the village. Hills (Novgorod region) in a family of hereditary teachers. His childhood was during the difficult war years. After the war, the family moved to Leningrad. Nikolai was an active child: he attended swimming and athletics sections, and was engaged in drawing and wood carving. In 1956, he graduated from school and worked for 2 years at a factory as a grinder and molder. He took up wrestling and boxing.

In 1958 he entered the philological department at the Pedagogical Institute. Herzen (Russian and English). During his studies, Zaitsev began to study subjects in more depth due to a lack of understanding of many things. Even then, he began to draw tables and make graphs, making it easier for himself to understand the subjects.

In 1963, as a fifth-year student, Nikolai interned as a translator in Indonesia. There the young teacher laid the foundation for his original educational system. The first experience of teaching my native language using my own methodology was successful.

He never received a diploma, because... his thesis was substandard. After college, Zaitsev worked as a teacher at an orphanage, in a children's colony, and a boarding school for special children. He tried his technique on special children. The success was variable, but it gave impetus to further research.

Then Zaitsev became a literature teacher at school. During this period, he developed a visual and without cumbersome rules system for teaching the native language for secondary schools. The test results were negative: the students did not feel their native language, it was easier for them to memorize the rules, they were taught that way...

By the end of the 70s. Zaitsev gradually determined for himself the direction of experiments: educational visual programs and manuals for children from 1.5 years old. Everything was presented in a playful way.

And then success awaited him. His learning through blocks was easy for kids to understand.

The pedagogy of that time did not tolerate any deviations from the traditional one, therefore, before perestroika (80s), all of Zaitsev’s developments and manuals were not in demand. And only with the collapse of the USSR it began to be used in kindergartens and schools. Although the Ministry of Education did not officially recognize it.

In 1989, JSC Mazai (methodological alternatives to Zaitsev) was created, where the innovator became a leading specialist. This began the active dissemination of Zaitsev’s methods and manuals. For the first time, the production of cubes was established.

Since 1991, the technique has already been adapted for children aged 1.5-4 years.

In 1993, at the St. Petersburg kindergarten No. 74, Zaitsev was allowed to apply his methods. Since then it has been his creative laboratory. Here, in 1994, he first introduced a course in anatomy, physiology and human hygiene, ecology, adapted for children, and over five years of observation he noted a stable positive result. The children were interested and accessible to systematic, visual information about a person, his health, and the environment.

In 1995, Professor Ruvinsky founded the Academy of Creative Pedagogy (ATP). It united disparate innovative teachers, allowed them to exchange experiences, publish their methods, and improve their skills. Zaitsev became a professor at this academy.

In 1996, JSC Mazai was transformed into LLC Methods of Zaitsev, whose tasks remained the same: to develop, publish and implement manuals and methods of the author. This association continues to operate successfully to this day. It produces “Zaitsev’s Cubes”, “Stochet”, “I Write Beautifully”, etc.

Professor Zaitsev lives in St. Petersburg, gives lectures throughout the country, and develops new manuals. He has many like-minded students. He is still a leading specialist at the non-state institution of additional education “Methodology of N. Zaitsev”. Despite its popularity, his system is never officially recognized.

Origins and fundamentals of the technique

When developing his system, Zaitsev relied on the research of I.M. Sechenova, I.P. Pavlova, A.A. Ukhtomsky, V.M. Bekhterev.

He used these conclusions:

dividing the sensory stream into elements, and then linking these elements into groups is very well perceived by the brain;
Perception can be enhanced by presenting information with a clearly defined rhythm.

Zaitsev made this discovery in neurophysiology the basis of his system. The main idea of his methodology is based on the fact that the process of cognition should be based on all forms of perception of the child:

thinking;
hearing;
vision;
motor and tactile memory.

Zaitsev's educational material activates the child's perception, since it is systematic (from the particular to the general and vice versa), collected in one place and attractive, attracting attention. Essentially, this methodology builds on the foundations of collaborative pedagogy. The role of the teacher is:

to organizing a fun, playful learning environment;
mentoring assistance to a child in learning reading, counting, writing, and grammar.

Another basis of his method was the use of the warehouse as an elementary particle of speech. A warehouse is a merger of a consonant and vowels of a letter, simply a vowel, a consonant in an open syllable. This is a more natural division of a word than a syllable. This is how babies start talking. And this makes it easier to learn to read.

The origins of this lie in the same neurophysiology, since the warehouse is a conscious effort of the muscles of the speech apparatus. These efforts can be easily detected by placing your hand lightly around your neck under the base of your jaw and saying something loudly. The idea itself is not new. Teaching literacy using Zaitsev’s method is very similar to Fedot Kuzmichev’s primer (19th century) and L. Tolstoy’s alphabet (he studied using Kuzmichev’s primer). These books are based on the warehouse method rather than syllables.

After 200 years, Zaitsev, having absorbed his previous experience, moved on. According to his method, there is no need to purposefully learn letters at all. They will simply learn themselves in the process of playing with manuals on which warehouses are written. For the first time, he tried a method of quickly mastering a language using warehouses on his cubes.

Then there were tables. Here Zaitsev relied on experience (a system of reference signals) and Erdniev (an enlarged unit of didactics). He created tables through which a huge amount of information was transmitted in a minimum number of characters. The correct placement of these tables on the walls allowed information to quickly appear in memory.

Zaitsev’s methodology broke the main stereotype of traditional teaching: the rule-exercise, and moved away from the scattered and unsystematic nature of the material. Moreover, this neurophysiological approach ensured high voluntary mobility of the child during training with minimal visual load.

General description of Zaitsev’s technique

The innovative teacher set himself the goal of teaching children reading, writing, literacy and numeracy without cramming or imposition. While studying at the institute, he already realized that traditional education is not effective. His system was developed in the same direction. He moved away from the traditional training scheme: exercise-assignment. Only a game, only what is interesting and no violence. Nikolai Alexandrovich laid down the following principles in his system:

the child does not learn to live, but lives here and now, so he will learn what interests him now;
learning should keep pace with the child’s development, not ahead of it;
the child can access any complex tasks if they are accessible and relevant to him;
a child is an active person, not an object of learning;
the child explores the world around him with his whole body, movement for him is an additional source of information.

They allow you to give a powerful impetus to the child’s natural abilities, pushing him towards self-development.

Features of the technique

“The essence is simplicity and consistency!”

The technique is very child-friendly. Since classes are held in the form of a game, there are no:

fears of error;
losers and losers;
comments;
coercion;
notations;
calls;
assessments.

Zaitsev's classes are very noisy and relaxed. The author has developed hundreds of games, so each new lesson is different from the previous one.

Classes are equipped in a special way:

desks are placed around the perimeter so as not to obscure visual material;
Tables are hung on the walls at a height of 170 cm from the floor.

The material is given to the child immediately in its entirety on tables, and he can assimilate it at his own pace. All warehouses are systematized on cubes and wall tables. Each cube has a row and a column in the table. After working with the cubes, the children run with a pointer to the tables in search of the necessary warehouses. They involuntarily go through dozens of options, easily remembering them. The high systematic nature of the benefits allows children to quickly grasp their algorithm.

Between the tables with warehouses there are “Hundred Counting” tables, using which children learn to add and subtract two-digit numbers.

Lessons are naturally competitive: everyone wants to give the correct answer as quickly as possible and peers at the table from anywhere in the class. This is how you are forced to start reading tables from different distances, and your vision is involuntarily trained. Students spend most of the lesson moving with their heads raised (looking at the tables), strengthening their posture. In such an environment, children think more actively, and the learning process proceeds effectively.

Famous Zaitsev cubes: what are they?

The cubes are designed for teaching reading, primary literacy and writing. The set contains 52 cubes (7 repeating ones, for words like dyad-dya). Each cube has warehouses marked on it, there are 200 of them in total. The cubes in the set differ in various ways:

size;
color (12);
material;
sound;
by filler;
by weight.

These features help children feel the difference between vowels and consonants, voiced and soft, and remember different characters:

Large cubes have hard parts, small ones have soft ones.
White cube - with punctuation marks.
There are double cubes with consonants that are not friends with all vowels (zha, zhu, zhi).
There are no warehouses on the cubes.
Voiced warehouses are a metal cube, blind warehouses are wooden.
The golden cube is the vowels.
Warehouses with a hard sign are located on iron-wooden cubes, and with a soft sign - on wooden-gold ones.
All letters are different colors: vowels - blue, consonants - blue,
Hard and soft signs are green.

While playing, children remember the shapes and features of the cubes. From warehouses it is easy to form words. Then all this is built into a coherent grammatical system. Getting to know warehouses begins with cubes and ends with tables.

Zaitsev tables

Zaitsev's tables are highly systematic visual teaching aids on which all educational material is modeled.

The tables present all the material at once and are hung on the walls.

They create a learning information environment. Tables are multifunctional intermediaries between students and mentors:

learn;
give information;
are guides to educational material;
practice the necessary skills;
help mutual learning.

to warehouses (for comparing the qualities of sounds - softness, dullness, sonority, hardness, softness and for composing words);
for hundreds (for learning to count within 100 - this is a 4-color tape with numbers from 0-99, groups of squares and circles for learning tens, even-odd);
to mathematical ones (shows what numbers are made of, their properties, operations on them, the origin of numbers, fractions, powers).

Tables and cubes are inseparable parts of the learning process.

Model of kindergartens according to Zaitsev

The Zaitsev system is often used in kindergartens to teach children:

reading;
mathematics;
singing in chorus;
synthesis of drawing and writing;
basic grammar;
anatomy;
geography;
ecology;
botany;
zoology.

Zaitsev has developed and tested special techniques and manuals for all these areas. In addition to teaching a child writing, reading, and counting, Zaitsev’s methods involve introducing children to the world around them.

At the age of 3, children experience a crisis in the formation of their personality, which is associated with the formation of their own self. A child who does not understand what is required of him and why refuses to follow the rules proposed by adults. The child begins to neglect his own safety.

The introduction of such areas as anatomy, ecology, and geography into the kindergarten curriculum is quite justified. As children get to know themselves, they consciously follow the rules proposed by adults. It is at 4-7 years old that a child easily navigates:

to maintain a healthy lifestyle;
on not smoking;
not drinking alcohol;
not using drugs;
to preserve the environment;
to maintain your health;
for your safety.

And for this, the baby must understand his structure, know about things that are useful and harmful for him. Moreover, after anatomy, botany appears, and then zoology. This signifies the importance of man in nature. And geography is the path to peace.

Everything is connected here: anatomy is the path from oneself to the world, and geography is from the world to oneself and from oneself to the world.

In kindergartens with such items, injuries are rare, children are not afraid of doctors, strive for physical education, are non-aggressive, neat, eat properly and strive to learn even more about the world around them.

Zaitsev’s pedagogy of cooperation is very non-aggressive and gentle towards the child:

The mentor offers the children all the material at once, who master it at a comfortable pace.
The mentor works according to the child’s program without forcing him to do anything.
The absence of assessment of children excludes the emergence of lagging behind. Children's fear disappears, they just play, and in the game it is possible to lose.
The atmosphere in the classroom is very democratic, children do not notice the learning process itself, they just play, and the teacher guides them in the right direction.

Role of parents

Zaitsev's methodology is part of the pedagogy of cooperation. The main thing in it is the creation of a learning environment and a mentor.

The educational environment is created together with parents, which gives a powerful impetus to the development of the child.
Parents should also support the authority of their children's mentors.
If at least one link drops out of the child-mentor-parents system, training becomes useless.
Parents should be passionate about learning and help their child with pleasure. This will be the key to their child's success.
If parents decide to teach their child according to Zaitsev’s method at home, they must create a creative developmental environment, understand the basics of the system, and then begin systematic classes. Only then can we hope for success. We must remember that Zaitsev’s cubes are not just toys, but teaching aids.

Advantages of Zaitsev’s technique

Doctors, psychologists, valeologists, physiologists, and teachers speak well of Zaitsev’s method. The system is based on natural, natural reactions of the body; it very easily adapts to the conditions of a kindergarten, school or home, groups of children of different ages and composition. Shows itself well when working with special children.

Here are its advantages:

quick mastery of reading, writing and counting (10-12 lessons for preschoolers and a week for first-graders);
not attached to a certain age;
each child learns at an individual pace;
the possibility of successful homeschooling;
literacy for life;
lack of physical inactivity and preservation of vision;
absence of student-teacher-parent conflicts;
development of the child’s self-organization;
simplicity, consistency, clarity;
a combination of play and strict internal logic.

Disadvantages of Zaitsev's technique

Many years of use of the Zaitsev system in kindergartens, development and rehabilitation centers, and schools revealed some shortcomings:

There are complaints from speech therapists and speech pathologists about missing endings in speech.
Children have difficulties with phonics.
Benefits are quite expensive.
Difficulties in using the letter E.
When homeschooling, a combination with traditional methods is required to achieve results.
Early learning to read gives a powerful impetus to the development of centers for the perception of writing, which can lead to a delay in the development of oral speech.
The technique is effective only for right-handed people.
Children may not be able to distinguish individual speech sounds by ear, which can affect their writing.
The system does not develop creativity.

Popularity of the Zaitsev system

The paradox of our country: a methodology that is not recognized by the state educational system is widely known and used not only in Russia and the CIS countries, but throughout the world (in Europe, Australia, the USA, Israel). Specialized centers for training hare teachers have been opened in 86 countries around the world.

The author of the methodology can easily adapt it to any language in the world, which means it is possible to create an international pedagogical complex. There are already methods for Russian, English, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Kazakh, Tatar, Armenian and French.

Zaitsev has hundreds of like-minded people and followers. For example, Elena Grigorievna Afanasova, a valeologist from Moscow, herself develops training manuals according to the Zaitsev system, and has been successfully teaching children and training teachers for 10 years.

The training system of the St. Petersburg teacher Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zaitsev became very popular. Zaitsev’s teaching methodology is based on the idea that the elementary particle of speech is the warehouse.

A warehouse is a pair of a consonant with a vowel, or a consonant with a hard or soft sign, or one letter. Zaitsev wrote these warehouses on the edges of his famous cubes.

When a child begins to speak, he does not pronounce letters separately, he says “ma”, “pa”, “ba”. This method was used on cubes. Learning with Zaitsev's cubes takes place through play, children sing syllables, clap their hands, jump and run. In the same way, children get acquainted with mathematics through play. Zaitsev developed special tables on which children perform arithmetic operations.

Training according to Zaitsev’s method includes not only tables of syllables and arithmetic operations, but also toys that make different sounds, musical instruments, cubes with cut pictures, puzzles, construction sets, etc. In addition, the learning environment created in kindergarten or school must be supported at home. Tables should be hung around the apartment, any household activity should be accompanied by certain methodological instructions, and a lot depends on the spirit that reigns in the family.

Zaitsev's cubes differ in 46 characteristics. Large and small, “iron”, “wooden” and “gold”. The cubes weigh and sound differently.

“Golden” cubes ring, “iron” cubes rattle, “wooden” cubes make a dull thud.
Sounds help children feel the difference between vowels and consonants, voiced and soft.

Learning is helped by singing blocks and chains of warehouses to several tunes. The size of the letters and signs in Zaitsev's tables and on Zaitsev's cubes is sufficient so that they can be perceived by a child from a distance of several meters without any strain.

The counting method, based on Zaitsev's tables, is offered to children from three years old. A four-color ribbon with numbers from 0 to 99 in numbers and in the form of grouped objects - circles and squares. Even three-year-old children are able to find any ordered number on the tape in a very short time. Even and odd ones differ in color, and the composition of the number is also clear to everyone: the number of tens, units.
Cut cards represent a number in its ratio to a hundred (for example, 54 filled squares in a matrix of 10 * 10 cells and 46 unshaded ones).

Children 4-5 years old easily move on to adding and subtracting within a hundred; first-graders do this after a few lessons, avoiding months of familiarization with numbers and sitting for a hundred hours in ten.

The transition from the number tape to table 1 helps to speed up addition and subtraction operations within a hundred, bring them to automaticity and move on to mental calculations earlier than the deadlines provided for by traditional programs.

Six cubes and table 2 will help children master writing and reading three-digit numbers, create figurative ideas about their composition - the number of hundreds, tens, units.

Table 3 will introduce students to the writing and naming of multi-digit numbers.
Zaitsev's manuals will be interesting and useful to all children. Classes with Zaitsev's Cubes are based on play and children learn while enjoying the lessons.

Voskobovich's "folders"

The game-aid "Skladushki" is intended for teaching children early (from 3-4 years old) reading in a storage system. The warehouse system of teaching children early reading is now widespread. In addition to the fact that children initially learn to pronounce warehouses in this system the way they sound in words, the warehouses themselves are located in a strictly defined way. This game is a popular system of teaching reading to young children by the famous St. Petersburg teacher N. Zaitsev, revised by V. Voskobovich.

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Zaitsev tables

Nikolai Aleksandrovich Zaitsev’s cubes are a technique that became popular in the last century. Today it is considered a classic method of teaching young children. Its special feature is the game basis for learning to read.

Nowadays, every kindergarten has Zaitsev's cubes. Teachers and educators recommend that parents use them in the home environment. Actually, what kind of technique is this and how to use it?

Zaitsev cubes

Methodology: essence, principles, features

Let me immediately note that Zaitsev’s method is not a list of instructions, following which you can achieve the desired result, in our case, teaching a child to read. These are almost ordinary cubes. “Almost”, because they depict letters, or rather warehouses (so to speak, “reduced syllables”). An example of a warehouse can be seen in the word “duckling”, in contrast to the syllable of warehouses, it has four: y, those, but, k. Well, now you understand what we are talking about. Now let's talk about how to use this invention.

Instructions

Everything here is elementary and simple. The fact is that it is enough to buy cubes and put them in a visible place. The child himself will reach out to see what kind of wonder this is. As a result, the baby will begin to collect towers from cubes, build trains, and gradually collect whole words.

Playing with cubes and learning is easy!

But it's still too early for that. The author of the technique suggested that parents sing the warehouses together with their child. Yes, yes, you randomly start humming any melody with the help of warehouses, showing the baby the cubes that you use in the song. For example, when you sing “B”, give the child a “B” cube in his hands. The baby will happily begin to repeat “si” after you.

If your baby gets tired of the song, you can switch to any other game. Children do not like to hold their attention to something for a long time.
Your task is to playfully (without imposing) introduce your child to the basics of reading.
You need to work according to Zaitsev’s method consistently, systematically, but without putting pressure on the child.

A little time will pass, and you will not be at all surprised that the baby himself will begin to hum the tune of his favorite song, and then he will also begin to pester you with questions: what will “mom” be, let’s add my name, etc.

How to use Zaitsev cubes

As you can see, Zaitsev’s cubes are a fairly simple and at the same time effective method of teaching children to read. By purchasing it, you will kill two birds with one stone - teach your child to read and give him one of the games dear to his heart from his childhood - cubes.