Four faces of a children's game
Studying the problem of the state of play as the leading activity of a preschooler in modern kindergartens, during refresher courses with teachers, sometimes with very solid work experience, in discussions with students who are on the border (tomorrow they will be teachers, but only yesterday they were these playing children), in the process of observing the activities of preschoolers themselves, and the study of the corresponding scientific and practical literature made it possible to single out both the «ideal form» (L. S. Vygotsky) of children's play activity, and the ways of its distortion in theory and practice, which make it impossible to properly design the educational work in this sphere and, as a result, violate the normal conditions for the formation of activity. The work will consistently reveal four approaches to children's play: the «conditionally pedagogical» one, where the emphasis is on the «correctness» and «spectacularity» of external action; the “conditionally parental” one, where the attention is focused on the “developing” functions of play and toys, without understanding what development is; the «child's» one, where the play is primarily an interesting, free and independent activity and the “psychological” one, which retains the characteristics of the “child's” approach, but at the same time focuses on the appropriation of an “ideal form” that provides the structural and substantive complication of children's activity, during which the genesis of age-related new formations and abilities of the child takes place.