Features of play activities of senior preschool age
At this stage of development of the game, word and deed come together, and role-playing behavior becomes a model of relationships between people that are meaningful to children. The stage of the actual role-playing game begins, in which the players simulate the labor and social relations of people familiar to them.
A scientific understanding of the stage-by-stage development of play activity makes it possible to develop clearer, systematized recommendations for guiding the play activities of children in different age groups.
In order to achieve a genuine, emotionally rich game, including an intellectual solution to a game problem, the teacher needs to comprehensively guide the formation, namely: purposefully enrich the child’s practical experience, gradually transferring it into a conventional game plan, and during independent games, encourage the preschooler to creatively reflect reality.
The game is dynamic where the management is aimed at its gradual formation, taking into account those factors that ensure the timely development of gaming activity at all age levels. Here it is very important to rely on the child’s personal experience. Game actions formed on its basis acquire a special emotional overtones. Otherwise, learning to play becomes mechanical. Emotions cement the game, make it exciting, create a favorable climate for relationships, increase the tone that every child needs - a share of his mental comfort, and this, in turn, becomes a condition for the preschooler’s receptivity to educational actions and joint activities with peers.
All components of a comprehensive guide to the formation of play are interconnected and equally important when working with children. As children grow older, the organization of their practical experience also changes, which is aimed at actively learning the real relationships between people in the process of joint activities. In this regard, the content of educational games and the conditions of the subject-game environment are updated. The emphasis of activating communication between adults and children shifts: it becomes businesslike, aimed at achieving joint goals. Adults act as one of the participants in the game, encouraging children to engage in joint discussions, statements, disputes, conversations, and contribute to the collective solution of game problems that reflect the joint social and labor activities of people.
So, the formation of play activities creates the necessary psychological conditions and favorable soil for the comprehensive development of the child. Comprehensive education of children, taking into account their age characteristics, requires systematization of the games used in practice, the establishment of connections between different forms of independent play and non-play activities that take place in a playful form. As you know, any activity is determined by its motive, that is, by what this activity is aimed at. Play is an activity whose motive lies within itself. This means that the child plays because he wants to play, and not for the sake of obtaining some specific result, which is typical for everyday life, work and any other productive activity.
GAME STORIES AND CONTENTS
The main component of a role-playing game is the plot; without it, there is no role-playing game itself. The plot of the game is the sphere of reality that is reproduced by children. The plot is a child’s reflection of certain actions, events, relationships from the life and activities of those around him. At the same time, his playful actions ( turning the steering wheel of a car, preparing lunch, teaching students how to draw, etc.) are one of the main means of realizing the plot.
The plots of the games are varied. Conventionally, they are divided into household (family games, kindergarten), industrial, reflecting the professional work of people (games in a hospital, store, livestock farm), public (games in celebration of the city’s birthday, in the library, school, flight to the moon).
Throughout the history of mankind, the plots of children's games change because they depend on the era, economic characteristics, cultural, geographical, and natural conditions. Thus, the games of children of the peoples of the North reflect the hunting of seals, walruses, and the work of reindeer herders. Children living in coastal regions play shipbuilders, work in the port, and greet tourists.
But, in addition, in every era there were serious, sometimes extreme events that significantly affected people's lives and evoked an emotional response in children and adults. Such events always gave rise to new stories for children's games. For many years, the children of our country played the Great Patriotic War (battles, bombings, evacuation of civilians, hospital, partisans, siege of Leningrad, Victory Parade, etc.). After Yuri Gagarin's flight into space (April 12, 1961), children from many countries around the world began to play in the exploration of interplanetary space (building rockets, going to Mars, the Moon, working on the Mir space station).
In the history of mankind, there are also “eternal” plots of children’s games that seem to connect generations of people: games of family, school, treatment of the sick, etc. Naturally, these plots in the games of children of different times and peoples differ in their content, just as they differ in the very life.
The content of the game, notes D. B. Elkonin, is what is reproduced by the child as a central and characteristic moment of activity and relationships between adults in their everyday, work, and social activities.
Depending on the depth of the child’s ideas about the activities of adults, the content of the games also changes. For example, children in the younger group, pretending to be a doctor in the game, repeated the same actions many times: they measured the temperature, looked at the patient’s throat. After the kids were vaccinated, new actions were added to the game image of the doctor. Children from the older group, when agreeing to play hospital, specified which specialists would treat the patients: a surgeon, an ophthalmologist, a pediatrician. Depending on the doctor’s specialization, each player performed specific actions, while the doctors spoke kindly to the patients, persuaded them not to be afraid of injections, operations, dressings, and to take medications more boldly. Thus, the content of the game expresses different levels of the child’s penetration into the activities of adults. Initially, only the external side of the activity is “grabbed” in real life and reflected in the game (with which a person acts: “a person is an object”). Then, as the child understands the relationship of a person to his activity, the elementary comprehension of the social meaning of work, the games begin to reflect the relationships between people (“person - person”), and the objects themselves are easily replaced (a cube is a bar of soap, bread, an iron, a typewriter) or They only imagine themselves (“as if I had scuba gear and was sinking to the bottom of the ocean”).
In terms of content, the games of children of primary preschool age differ These differences are associated with the relative limitations of experience, features of the development of imagination, thinking, and speech. The child cannot imagine the game before it starts and does not grasp the logical sequence between real events. Therefore, the content of the games, as A.P. Usova noted, is fragmentary and illogical. Children often repeat in play actions with toys shown by adults and related to everyday life: fed the bear - put him to bed; I fed him again and put him to bed again. A.P. Usova characterized such games as action games. Moreover, interest in actions often dominates, so the goal of the game escapes the child’s field of vision. For example, Olya sat her daughters down at the table, went to cook dinner, got carried away with working with pots and pans, and her daughters remained unfed.
However, at the border between the third and fourth years of life, games become more meaningful, which is associated with the expansion of children’s ideas about the world around them. Preschoolers begin to combine different events, including in games episodes from their own experience and from literary works that were read to them or, which is especially valuable, shown through plot-didactic games, illustrations in books, table theater, and filmstrips.
In the fourth and fifth years of life, the integrity of the plot and the interconnectedness of the reflected events are observed in children’s games. Preschoolers develop an interest in certain scenes that they have played with before (family, hospital, construction workers, transport, etc.). Children respond vividly to new experiences, weaving them like storylines into familiar games. The enrichment of content is facilitated by the interaction of children in the game, when everyone contributes something of their own, individual. For example, Seryozha, whose father is a captain of a river steamer, invites the “teacher” to take the children on a ride along the Moscow River. Having received consent, he builds a steamboat out of chairs and welcomes passengers on board. At this age, generalization and truncation of situations depicted in the game begin, which are well mastered by the child in real life and do not arouse special interest in him. So, if children, playing in kindergarten, eat for a long time and drink from cups, then children of the fifth year of life finish lunch barely raising a spoon to their mouth. Sometimes children limit themselves to symbolic actions: a sailor floats around a room that has become “like the sea.”
Children of senior preschool age thoughtfully approach the choice of plot, discuss it in advance, and plan the development of the content at an elementary level. New stories are appearing that are inspired by impressions gleaned outside the preschool: based on cartoon series, books read at home, stories from parents, etc. Travel games, including space games, have now become widespread: the scope of displaying the work of adults has expanded (service work in bank, transport, security and law enforcement services, etc.).
In older and preschool age, generalization of play situations continues; in addition to conditional and symbolic actions (put his head on his palm - he fell asleep), children actively use verbal comments (“Everyone seems to have slept - and we’ll immediately go to the hall for the holiday!”; “Let’s do this: we’ve already arrived in Africa!”). These speech comments are a verbal replacement of any events. Children resort to them so as not to violate the logic of the unfolding of the game’s content.
Thus, throughout preschool childhood, the development and complication of the content of the game is carried out in the following areas:
- strengthening the focus, and therefore the consistency and coherence of what is depicted;
- a gradual transition from an expanded game situation to a collapsed one, generalization of what is depicted in the game (the use of conditional and symbolic actions, verbal substitutions).
The variety of content of role-playing games is determined by children’s knowledge of those aspects of reality that are depicted in the game, the consonance of this knowledge with the interests, feelings of the child, and his personal experience. Finally, the development of the content of games depends on the child’s ability to identify characteristic features in the activities and relationships of adults.
The content of the role-playing game is embodied by the child through the role he takes on. A role is a means of realizing the plot and the main component of a role-playing game.
For a child, a role is his playing position: he identifies himself with some character in the plot and acts in accordance with the ideas about this in the game . Every role contains its own rules of behavior, taken by the child from the surrounding life, borrowed from relationships in the adult world. So, the mother takes care of the children, prepares food for them, puts them to bed; The teacher speaks loudly and clearly, is strict, demands that everyone listen to her and not be naughty in class. Submission of the child to the rules of role-playing behavior is the most important element of role-playing play. Deviation of any of the players from these rules causes protests from the playing partners: “You can’t argue with the captain!” or: “The captains give orders loudly, and you ask the sailor to wash the deck!” Thus, for preschoolers, a role is an example of how to act. Based on this sample, the child evaluates the behavior of the participants in the game, and then his own.
The role appears in the game at the border between early and preschool age. In the third year of life, the child’s emancipation from the adult is observed. At the same time, the preschooler’s desire to act independently, but like an adult, grows. Then, while playing, the baby begins to perform individual actions characteristic of an adult (putting the doll to sleep, like a mother), although he does not call himself by the adult’s name. These are the first beginnings of the role. One more sign should be included among them: the child “voices” the toy, speaking on its behalf.
Throughout preschool childhood, the development of role in role-playing games occurs from the performance of role-playing actions to role-images. For younger preschoolers , everyday activities predominate: cooking, bathing, washing, driving, etc. Then role designations associated with certain actions appear: I am a mother, I am a driver, I am a doctor. The role taken gives a certain direction and meaning to actions with objects: the mother chooses toys or objects for play that are necessary for preparing dinner, bathing the child; the doctor selects a pencil thermometer for treatment, tears up pieces of paper for mustard plasters, pours imaginary medicine from a bottle, etc. Children prefer to play the roles of those adults whose activities require certain paraphernalia: the mother has a set of household items, the doctor has medical instruments, medicines , the driver has a vehicle. Thus, when playing a role, children of primary preschool age use toys, real objects (a spoon, a basin for bathing a doll), as well as substitute objects (a pencil or stick becomes a knife, spoon, thermometer, syringe in the game). Role-playing interaction between the players is carried out through object-based game actions: the doctor treats the patient, measuring the temperature, giving injections, etc.
In middle preschool age, playing a role becomes a significant motive for play activity: the child develops a desire not just to play, but to fulfill one or another role. The point of the game for a 4-5 year old preschooler is the relationships between the characters. Therefore, the child willingly takes on those roles in which the relationships are clear to him (the teacher takes care of the children, the captain steers the ship, makes sure that the sailors work well and that the passengers are comfortable). The child depicts these relationships in play using speech, facial expressions, and gestures. At this age, role speech becomes a means of interaction. Since children develop a selective attitude towards certain roles, their distribution before the start of the game is a rather emotional process. The teacher's help is necessary.
In older preschool age, the meaning of the game lies in the typical relationships of the person whose role is played by the child with other persons whose roles are taken on by other children. In games, role-playing dialogues appear, with the help of which the relationships between characters are expressed and game interaction is established. For the quality of role performance, the child’s attitude towards it is important. Therefore, it should be borne in mind that older preschoolers are reluctant to perform roles that, in their opinion, do not correspond to their gender. Thus, boys refuse to play the role of a teacher, the head of a preschool institution, and in the game of school they agree to be only a physical education teacher. When performing a role, the child takes into account not so much the external logic, the sequence of actions (there is a free runway at the airfield, which means the plane can land), but the meaning of social relations (the runway is free, but you need to ask the dispatcher so that an accident does not happen).
