Socio-emotional and personal development of a child is one of the key factors that determine the success of the educational process at its early stages. How successful the first steps of a child in his/her first year at school will be is certainly associated with the level of his/her personal, social and emotional development (Merrel, Bailey, 2008). The understanding of the characteristics of the socio-emotional development and identification of its typical patterns may allow teachers to build educational process more efficiently, and students will be more effective and productive. Socio-emotional development is a kind of basis for the education of the junior schoolchildren (Bradley et al., 2001). In the present paper we make an attempt to describe the main patterns of social emotional and personal development of a child in the beginning of the first year at school on the basis of the results of a large-scale study of the first-graders of the Russian schools. In the paper the instruments are presented, which were developed on the material of a large empirical project IPIPS (The International Performance Indicators in Primary Schools). The research was performed on a large sample (N=1218) in the Republic of Tatarstan. In the result the stable patterns of development were identified, characteristic for the Russian first-grader in the beginning of study at school. The acquired results may become the important instrument for individualization of education and self-assessment of a teacher and a school as a whole at the important stage of beginning of education.