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Play and its role in the mental development of a child

Transcript of a lecture given in 1933 at Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute named after. A.I. Herzen.

When we talk about play and its role in the development of a preschooler, two main questions arise here. The first question is how the game itself arises in development, the question of the origin of the game, its genesis; the second question is what role does this activity play in development, what does play mean as a form of child development in preschool age. Is play the leading or simply the predominant form of activity for a child at this age?

It seems to me that from a developmental point of view, play is not the predominant form of activity, but it is, in a certain sense, the leading line of development in preschool age.

Now let's move on to the problem of the game itself. We know that defining play by the pleasure it brings to a child is not the right definition for two reasons. Firstly, because we are dealing with a number of activities that can bring a child much more intense experiences of pleasure than play.

The principle of pleasure applies equally, for example, to the process of sucking, since the child derives functional pleasure from sucking on the pacifier, even when he is not satisfied.

On the other hand, we know games in which the very process of activity does not yet bring pleasure - games that dominate at the end of preschool and at the beginning of school age and which bring pleasure only if their result turns out to be interesting for the child; these are, for example, the so-called “sports games” (sports games are not only physical education games, but also games with winnings, games with results). They are very often colored by an acute feeling of displeasure when the game ends not in the child’s favor.

Thus, defining a game based on pleasure, of course, cannot be considered correct.

However, it seems to me that to refuse to approach the problem of play from the point of view of how the child’s needs, his motivations for activity, and his affective aspirations are realized in it would mean terribly intellectualizing the game. The difficulty of a number of game theories is some intellectualization of this problem.

I am inclined to give this question an even more general meaning and I think that the mistake of a number of age theories is to ignore the needs of the child - understanding them in a broad sense, starting with drives and ending with interest, as a need of an intellectual nature - in short, ignoring everything that can be combined under the name of motivations and motives of activity. We often explain a child's development by the development of his intellectual functions, i.e. Every child appears before us as a theoretical being who, depending on the greater or lesser level of intellectual development, moves from one age level to another.

The child's needs, drives, motivations, and motives for his activities are not taken into account, without which, as research shows, the child never makes the transition from one stage to another. In particular, it seems to me that the analysis of the game should begin with clarification of these very points.

Apparently, any shift, any transition from one age level to another is associated with a sharp change in motives and motivations for activity.

What is the greatest value for a baby almost ceases to interest the child at an early age. This ripening of new needs, new motives for activity, of course, must be brought to the fore. In particular, one cannot help but see that a child in play satisfies some needs, some impulses, and that without understanding the uniqueness of these impulses we cannot imagine the unique type of activity that is play.

In preschool age, unique needs, unique motivations arise, which are very important for the entire development of the child and directly lead to play. They lie in the fact that a child at this age develops a whole series of unrealizable tendencies and desires that cannot be directly realized. A young child tends to directly resolve and satisfy his desires. Delaying the fulfillment of a desire is difficult for a young child; it is possible only within certain narrow limits; no one knew a child under three years old who had the desire to do something in a few days. Usually the path from motivation to its implementation is extremely short. It seems to me that if in preschool age we did not have the maturation of needs that were not immediately fulfilled, then we would not have games. Research shows that not only where we are dealing with children who are not sufficiently intellectually developed, but also where we have underdevelopment of the affective sphere, play does not develop.

It seems to me that from the point of view of the affective sphere, a game is created in a development situation in which unrealizable tendencies appear. A young child behaves like this: he wants to take a thing and he needs to take it now. If this thing cannot be taken, then he either makes a scandal - he lies down on the floor and kicks, or he refuses, puts up with it, and does not take this thing. His unsatisfied desires have their own special ways of replacement, refusal, etc. By the beginning of preschool age, unsatisfied desires and tendencies that cannot be immediately realized appear, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the tendency of early childhood towards the immediate realization of desires remains. The child wants, for example, to be in the mother’s place or wants to be a rider and ride a horse. This is an unrealistic desire now. What does a young child do if he sees a carriage passing by and wants to ride it at all costs? If this is a capricious and spoiled child, then he will demand from his mother that at all costs he be put on this carriage, he may throw himself on the ground right there in the street, etc. If this is an obedient child, accustomed to giving up desires, then he will move away, or the mother will offer him candy, or simply distract him with some stronger affect, and the child will give up his immediate desire.

In contrast, after three years of age, a child develops peculiar contradictory tendencies; on the one hand, he has a whole series of immediately unrealizable needs, desires that cannot be fulfilled now and yet are not eliminated like desires; on the other hand, he retains almost entirely the tendency to immediately realize desires.

This is where play arises, which, from the point of view of the question of why a child plays, should always be understood as an imaginary illusory realization of unrealized desires.

Imagination is that new formation that is absent in the consciousness of a young child, absolutely absent in an animal, and which represents a specific human form of consciousness activity; like all functions of consciousness, it arises initially in action. The old formula that children's play is imagination in action can be turned around and said that the imagination of a teenager and schoolchild is play without action.

It is difficult to imagine that the impulse that makes a child play is really just an affective impulse of the same kind as that of an infant when sucking a pacifier.

It's hard to let the pleasure come preschool game was caused by the same affective mechanism as simply sucking a pacifier. This does not fit in with anything from the point of view of the development of a preschooler.

All this does not mean that the game arises in As a result of each individual unsatisfied desire, the child wanted to take a ride on the carriage - this desire was not satisfied now, the child came into the room and began to play with the carriage. That never happens. Here we are talking about the fact that the child has not only individual affective reactions to individual phenomena, but generalized non-objectified affective tendencies. Let's take a child suffering from a low-value complex, a microcephalic child, for example; he could not be in the children's group - he was teased so much that he began to break all the mirrors and glass where his image was. This is a profound difference from early childhood; there, with a separate phenomenon (in a specific situation), for example, every time they tease, a separate affective reaction arises, not yet generalized. In preschool age, a child generalizes his affective attitude towards a phenomenon, regardless of the current specific situation, since the attitude is affectively connected with the meaning of the phenomenon, which is why he always displays a complex of low value.

The essence of the game is that it is the fulfillment of desires, but not of individual desires, but of generalized affects. A child at this age is aware of his relationships with adults, he reacts to them affectively, but unlike early childhood, he generalizes these affective reactions (he is impressed by the authority of adults in general, etc.).

The presence of such generalized affects in the game also does not mean that the child himself understands the motives for which the game is started, that he does it consciously. He plays without realizing the motives for his gaming activity. This significantly distinguishes play from work and other activities. In general, it must be said that the area of ​​motives, actions, and impulses is among the less conscious and becomes fully accessible to consciousness only in adolescence. Only a teenager is aware of why he is doing this or that. Now let's leave the question regarding the affective side for a few minutes, let's look at this as some kind of prerequisite, and let's see how the play activity itself unfolds.

It seems to me that the criterion for separating a child’s play activity from general group In other forms of his activity, one should accept that in play the child creates an imaginary situation. This becomes possible on the basis of the divergence between the visible and semantic fields that appears in preschool age.

This idea is not new in the sense that the presence of a game with an imaginary situation has always been known, but it was considered as one of the groups of games. The imaginary situation was given the significance of a secondary feature. The imaginary situation was not, in the minds of the old authors, the basic quality that makes a game a game, since only one specific group of games was characterized by this feature.

The main difficulty of this idea, it seems to me, lies in three points. Firstly, there is a danger of an intellectualistic approach to the game; fears may arise that if the game is understood as symbolism, then it seems to turn into some kind of activity, similar to algebra in action; it turns into a system of some signs that generalize reality; here we no longer find anything specific to the game and imagine the child as a failed algebraist who does not yet know how to write symbols on paper, but depicts them in action. It is necessary to show the connection with the motives in the game, because the game itself, it seems to me, is never a symbolic action in the strict sense of the word.

Secondly, it seems to me that this thought represents play as a cognitive process, it points to the significance of this cognitive process, leaving aside not only the affective moment, but also the moment of the child’s activity.

The third point is that it is necessary to reveal what this activity does in development, i.e. that with the help of an imaginary situation a child can develop.

If you allow, let's start with the second question, since I have already briefly touched upon the question of the connection with affective motivation. We have seen that in the affective impulse that leads to play there are the beginnings not of symbolism, but of the necessity of an imaginary situation, for if play really develops from unsatisfied desires, from unrealized tendencies, if it consists in the fact that it is a realization in the form of a game trends that are currently unrealizable, then involuntarily the very affective nature of this game will contain moments of an imaginary situation.

Let's start with the second point - with the child's activity in the game. What does a child’s behavior in an imaginary situation mean? We know that there is a form of play that was also identified long ago and that usually belonged to the late period of preschool age; its development was considered central at school age; we are talking about games with rules. A number of researchers, although completely not belonging to the camp of dialectical materialists, have followed in this area the path that Marx recommends when he says that “the anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape.” They began to look at early play in the light of this late play with rules, and their research led to the conclusion that play with an imaginary situation is, in essence, a game with rules; It seems to me that one can even put forward the proposition that there is no game where there is no child’s behavior with the rules, his unique attitude towards the rules.

Let me clarify this idea. Let's take any game with an imaginary situation. Already an imaginary situation contains rules of behavior, although this is not a game with developed rules formulated in advance. The child imagines himself as a mother, and the doll as a child; he must behave in accordance with the rules of maternal behavior. This was demonstrated very well by one of the researchers in an ingenious experiment, based on Selly’s famous observations. The latter, as you know, described a game that was remarkable in that the game situation and the children’s real situation coincided. Two sisters - one five, the other seven years old - once agreed: “Let’s play sisters.” Thus, Selley described an incident where two sisters played at being two sisters, i.e. played out a real situation. The above-mentioned experiment based its methodology on children’s play, suggested by the experimenter, but a game that took on real relationships. In some cases I was able to induce such play in children extremely easily. Thus, it is very easy to force a child to play with his mother, pretending that he is a child and the mother is a mother, i.e. into what actually is. The significant difference between the game, as Selly describes it, is that the child, starting to play, tries to be a sister. A girl behaves in life without thinking that she is a sister to another. She does nothing in relation to the other, because she is the sister of this other, with the exception, perhaps, of those cases when the mother says: “give in.” In the sisters’ game of “sisters,” each of the sisters continually demonstrates her sisterhood all the time; the fact that two sisters began to play sisters leads to the fact that each of them receives rules for behavior. (In the entire game situation, I must be a sister in relation to another sister.) Only those actions that fit these rules are game, suitable for the situation.

The game takes a situation that emphasizes that these girls are sisters, they are dressed the same, they walk holding hands; in a word, what is taken is what emphasizes their position as sisters in relation to adults, in relation to strangers. The older one, holding the younger one by the hand, constantly talks about those who portray people: “These are strangers, these are not ours.” This means: “My sister and I act the same, we are treated the same, but others, strangers, are treated differently.” Here there is an emphasis on the sameness of everything that for a child is concentrated in the concept of sister, and this means that my sister stands towards me in a different relationship than strangers. What exists unnoticed by a child in life becomes a rule of behavior in play.

Thus, it turns out that if you create a game in such a way that there seems to be no imaginary situation in it, then what remains? The rule remains. What remains is that the child begins to behave in this situation, as this situation dictates.

Let's leave this wonderful experiment in the field of play for a moment and turn to any game. It seems to me that wherever there is an imaginary situation in the game, there is a rule. Not rules formulated in advance and changing throughout the game, but rules arising from an imaginary situation. Therefore, imagine that a child can behave in an imaginary situation without rules, i.e. the way he behaves in a real situation is simply impossible. If a child plays the role of a mother, then he has rules for the mother's behavior. The role played by the child, his attitude towards the object, if the object has changed its meaning, will always follow from the rule, i.e. the imaginary situation will always contain rules. In the game the child is free, but this is an illusory freedom.

If the task of the researcher at first was to reveal the implicit rule contained in any game with an imaginary situation, then relatively recently we received proof that the so-called “ pure game with rules” (a schoolchild and the game of a preschooler towards the end of this age) is essentially a game with an imaginary situation, for just as an imaginary situation necessarily contains rules of behavior, so any game with rules contains an imaginary situation. What does it mean, for example, to play chess? Create an imaginary situation. Why? Because the officer can only walk like this, the king like this, and the queen like that; beat, remove from the board, etc. - these are purely chess concepts; but some kind of imaginary situation, although it does not directly replace life relationships, is still there. Take the most simple game with rules for children. It immediately turns into an imaginary situation in the sense that as soon as the game is regulated by some rules, then a number of real actions turn out to be impossible in relation to this.

Just as in the beginning it was possible to show that every imaginary situation contains rules in a hidden form, it was also possible to show the opposite - that every game with rules contains an imaginary situation in a hidden form. The development from an explicit imaginary situation and hidden rules to a game with explicit rules and a hidden imaginary situation constitutes two poles and outlines the evolution of children's play.

Every game with an imaginary situation is at the same time a game with rules, and every game with rules is a game with an imaginary situation. I think this position is clear.

However, there is one misunderstanding that needs to be cleared up from the very beginning. A child learns to behave according to a well-known rule from the first months of his life. If you take a young child, then the rules that you must sit at the table and be silent, not touch other people’s things, obey your mother - these are the rules that a child’s life is full of. What is specific about the rules of the game? It seems to me that a solution to this issue is becoming possible in connection with some new work. In particular, Piaget's new work on the development of moral rules in the child provided me with the greatest help here; in this work there is one part devoted to the study of the rules of the game, in which Piaget gives, it seems to me, an extremely convincing solution to these difficulties.

Piaget distinguishes two, as he puts it, moralities in a child, two sources of development of the rules of child behavior, which are different from each other.

In the game this comes out with particular clarity. Some rules arise in a child, as Piaget shows, from the unilateral influence of an adult on a child. If you can’t touch other people’s things, then this rule was taught by your mother; or you have to sit quietly at the table - this is what adults put forward as an external law in relation to the child. This is one child's morality. Other rules arise, as Piaget says, from the mutual cooperation of an adult and a child or children among themselves; These are rules in the establishment of which the child himself participates.

The rules of the game, of course, differ significantly from the rules of not touching other people's things and sitting quietly at the table; First of all, they differ in that they are established by the child himself. These are his rules for himself, the rules, as Piaget says, of internal self-restraint and self-determination. The child says to himself: “I must behave this way and that way in this game.” This is completely different from when a child is told that this is possible, but that is not possible. Piaget showed a very interesting phenomenon in the development of children's morality, which he calls moral realism; he points out that the first line of development of external rules (what is possible and what is not) leads to moral realism, i.e. to the fact that the child confuses moral rules with physical rules; he confuses that you cannot light a match once again and that you cannot light a match or touch a glass at all, because it can be broken; All these “don’ts” are one and the same for a child at an early age; he has a completely different attitude towards the rules that he sets himself*.

Let us now turn to the question of the role of play and its influence on the development of the child. It seems huge to me.

I will try to convey two main ideas. I think that playing with an imaginary situation is essentially new, impossible for a child under three years old; This the new kind behavior, the essence of which is that activity in an imaginary situation frees the child from situational confinement.

The behavior of a young child to a large extent, the behavior of an infant to an absolute degree, as shown by the experiments of Levin et al., is behavior determined by the position in which the activity takes place. A famous example is Levin's experiment with a stone. This experience is a true illustration of the extent to which a young child is bound in every action by the situation in which his activity takes place. We found in this an extremely characteristic feature of the behavior of a young child in the sense of his attitude to the immediate environment, to the real situation in which his activity takes place. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast to what these experiments by Lewin depict for us in the sense of the situational connectedness of activity with what we see in play: in play, the child learns to act in a knowable, rather than visible, situation. I think this formula accurately captures what's happening in the game. In play, the child learns to act in the cognizable, i.e. in a mental, not a visible situation, relying on internal tendencies and motives, and not on motives and impulses that come from the thing. Let me remind you of Lewin's teaching about the motivating nature of things for a young child, that things dictate to him what needs to be done - the door pulls the child to open and close it, the stairs - to run up, the bell - to to call. In a word, things have an inherent motivating force in relation to the actions of a young child; it determines the child’s behavior to such an extent that Lewin came up with the idea of ​​​​creating a psychological topology, i.e. mathematically express the trajectory of a child’s movement in a field depending on how things with different attractive and repulsive forces for the child are located there.

What is the root of a child’s situational connectedness? We found it in one central fact of consciousness, characteristic of early age and consisting in the unity of affect and perception. Perception at this age is generally not independent, but the initial moment in the motor-affective reaction, i.e. every perception is therefore a stimulus to activity. Since the situation is always psychologically given through perception, and perception is not separated from affective and motor activity, it is clear that a child with such a structure of consciousness cannot act otherwise than bound by the situation, as bound by the field in which he is located.

In play, things lose their incentive. The child sees one thing, but acts differently in relation to what is seen. Thus, the situation is that the child begins to act regardless of what he sees. There are patients with some kind of brain damage who lose this ability to act regardless of what they see; When you see these patients, you begin to understand that the freedom of action that each of us and a child of a more mature age has, was not given immediately, but had to go through a long path of development.

Action in a situation that is not visible, but only thought, action in an imaginary field, in an imaginary situation leads to the fact that the child learns to determine his behavior not only by the direct perception of a thing or the situation directly affecting him, but by the meaning of this situation.

Young children discover in experiments and in everyday observation that it is impossible for them to diverge between the semantic and visible fields. This is a very important fact. Even a two-year-old child, when he must repeat, looking at the child sitting in front of him: “Tanya is walking,” changes the phrase and says: “Tanya is sitting.” In some diseases we are faced with exactly the same situation. Goldstein and Gelb described a number of patients who cannot say the wrong thing. Gelb has materials about one patient who, although able to write well with his left hand, could not write the phrase: “I can write well with my right hand”; looking out the window in good weather, he could not repeat the phrase: “The weather is bad today,” but said: “Today good weather" Very often, in a patient with a speech disorder, we have a symptom of the inability to repeat a meaningless phrase, for example: “The snow is black,” while a number of other phrases, equally difficult in grammatical and semantic composition, are repeated.

In a young child, there is a close merging of the word with the thing, the meaning with the visible, in which the divergence of the semantic field and the visible field becomes impossible.

This can be understood based on the process of child speech development. You tell your child “clock”. He starts searching and finds the watch, i.e. the first function of the word is to provide orientation in space, to highlight individual places in space; the word originally means a known place in a situation.

In preschool age, in play, we have for the first time a divergence of the semantic field and the optical field. It seems to me that we can repeat the thought of one of the researchers, who says that in a game action the thought is separated from the thing, and the action begins from the thought, and not from the thing.

A thought is separated from a thing because a piece of wood begins to play the role of a doll, a stick becomes a horse, an action according to the rules begins to be determined by the thought, and not by the thing itself. This is such a revolution in the child’s attitude to the real, concrete immediate situation, which is difficult to evaluate in all its significance. The child does not do this right away. Separating a thought (the meaning of a word) from a thing is a terribly difficult task for a child. The game is a transitional form to this. At that moment when the stick, i.e. thing becomes a reference point for separating the meaning of a horse from a real horse; at this critical moment one of the main psychological structures that determines the child’s attitude to reality radically changes.

The child cannot yet tear his thought away from a thing; he must have a fulcrum in another thing; here we have the expression of this weakness of the child; In order to think about the horse, to determine his actions with this horse, he needs a stick, a fulcrum. But still, at this critical moment, the basic structure that determines the child’s attitude to reality, namely the structure of perception, radically changes. A feature of human perception that arises at an early age is the so-called “real perception”. This is something for which we have nothing analogous in the perception of an animal. The essence of this is that I see not only the world as colors and shapes, but also a world that has meaning and meaning. I don’t see something round, black, with two hands, but I see a clock and can separate one from the other. There are patients who, when they see a watch, will say that they see a round, white thing with two thin steel stripes, but they do not know that it is a watch; they have lost their real relationship to the thing. So, the structure of human perception could be figuratively expressed in the form of a fraction, the numerator of which is the thing, and the denominator is the meaning; this expresses a certain relationship between thing and meaning, which arises on the basis of speech. This means that every human perception is not a single perception, but a generalized perception. Goldstein says that such object-formed perception and generalization are one and the same. In this fraction - thing-meaning - the thing is dominant for the child; the meaning is directly related to it. At that critical moment when the child’s stick becomes a horse, i.e. when a thing - a stick - becomes a reference point in order to tear the meaning of a horse from a real horse, this fraction, as the researcher says, is overturned, and the semantic moment becomes dominant: meaning/thing.

Nevertheless, the properties of the thing as such retain considerable significance: any stick can play the role of a horse, but, for example, a postcard cannot be a horse for a child. Goethe's proposition that for a child in play everything can become everything is wrong. For adults, with conscious symbolism, of course, the card can be a horse. If I want to show the location of the experiments, I put a match and say - this is a horse. And that's enough. For a child it cannot be a horse, it must be a stick, so the game is not symbolic. A symbol is a sign, and a stick is not a sign of a horse. The properties of a thing are preserved, but their meaning is overturned, i.e. thought becomes the central point. We can say that things in this structure from the dominant moment become something subordinate.

Thus, in play, the child creates such a structure - meaning/thing, where the semantic side, the meaning of the word, the meaning of the thing, is dominant, determining his behavior.

The meaning is emancipated to some extent from the thing with which it was previously directly fused. I would say that in play the child operates with a meaning that is divorced from the thing, but it is inseparable from the real action with the real object.

Thus, an extremely interesting contradiction arises, which lies in the fact that the child operates with meanings divorced from things and actions, but operates with them inseparably from some real action and some other real thing. This is the transitional nature of the game, which makes it an intermediate link between the purely situational connectedness of early childhood and thinking divorced from the real situation.

In the game, the child operates with things as things that have meaning, he operates with the meanings of words that replace the thing, so in the game the emancipation of the word from the thing occurs (a behaviorist would describe the game and its characteristic properties as follows: the child calls ordinary things by unusual names, his ordinary actions - unusual designations, despite the fact that he knows real names).

The separation of a word from a thing requires a support point in the form of another thing. But at that moment when the stick, that is, the thing, becomes a reference point for tearing off the meaning of “horse” from a real horse (a child cannot tear off the meaning from a thing or a word from a thing except by finding a support point in another thing, that is, by the force of one things steal the name of another), it makes one thing seem to influence another in the semantic field. The transfer of meanings is facilitated by the fact that the child takes a word for a property of a thing, does not see the word, but sees behind it the thing it signifies. For a child, the word “horse” related to a stick means: “there is a horse”, i.e. he mentally sees the thing behind the word.

The game moves on to internal processes at school age, to internal speech, logical memory, and abstract thinking. In the game, the child operates with meanings separated from things, but inseparably from real action with real objects, but separating the meaning of a horse from a real horse and transferring it to a stick (a real point of support, otherwise the meaning will evaporate, evaporate) and real action with a stick, as with horse, there is a necessary transitional stage to operating with meanings, that is, the child first acts with meanings as with things, and then realizes them and begins to think, that is, in the same way as before grammatical and written speech, the child has skills, but does not know what has them, that is, is not aware of them and does not possess them arbitrarily; In play, the child unconsciously and involuntarily takes advantage of the fact that meaning can be torn away from a thing, that is, he does not know what he is doing, does not know that he is speaking in prose, just as he speaks but does not notice the words.

Hence the functional definition of concepts, i.e. things, hence the word is part of the thing.

So, I would like to say that the fact of creating an imaginary situation is not a random fact in the life of a child, it has the first consequence of the emancipation of the child from situational confinement. The first paradox of the game is that the child operates with a detached meaning, but in a real situation. The second paradox is that the child acts in the game along the line of least resistance, i.e. he does what he wants most, since the game is associated with pleasure. At the same time, he learns to act along the line of greatest resistance: by obeying the rules, children refuse what they want, since obeying the rules and refusing to act on an immediate impulse in the game is the path to maximum pleasure.

If you take children in a sports game, you will see the same thing. Running a race turns out to be difficult, because the runners are ready to take off when you say “1, 2...”, and cannot stand it until 3. Obviously, the essence of the internal rules is that the child should not act on an immediate impulse.

The game continuously, at every step, creates demands on the child to act contrary to the immediate impulse, i.e. act along the line of greatest resistance. I immediately want to run - this is completely clear, but game rules they tell me to stop. Why does the child not do what he immediately wants to do now? Because following the rules throughout the structure of the game promises such great pleasure from the game that it is more than the immediate impulse; in other words, as one of the researchers states, recalling the words of Spinoza, “affect can only be overcome by another, stronger affect.” Thus, a situation is created in the game in which, as Zero says, a double affective plane arises. A child, for example, cries while playing, like a patient, but rejoices like a player. The child refuses direct impulse in the game, coordinating his behavior, each of his actions with the game rules. Gross described this brilliantly. His idea is that the will of a child is born and develops from playing with rules. Indeed, in the simple game of sorcerers that Gross describes, a child must run away from the sorcerer in order not to lose; at the same time, he must help his comrade and disenchant him. When the sorcerer touches him, he must stop. At every step, the child comes to a conflict between the rule of the game and what he would do if he could now act directly: in the game he acts contrary to what he now wants. Zero showed that the greatest strength of self-government in a child arises in play. He reached the maximum of the child's will in the sense of refusing direct attraction in the game - with sweets, which children were not supposed to eat according to the game rules, because they depicted inedible things. Usually a child experiences obedience to a rule in refusing what he wants, but here, obedience to a rule and refusal to act on an immediate impulse is the path to maximum pleasure.

Thus, an essential feature of the game is the rule, which has become an affect. “An idea that has become an affect, a concept that has turned into a passion” is the prototype of this Spinoza ideal in play, which is the realm of arbitrariness and freedom. Following a rule is a source of pleasure. The rule wins as the strongest impulse (cf. Spinoza - affect can be defeated by the strongest affect). It follows from this that such a rule is an internal rule, that is, a rule of internal self-restraint, self-determination, as Piaget says, and not a rule to which the child obeys, like a physical law. In short, play gives the child a new form of desires, i.e. teaches him to desire, relating desires to the fictitious “I”, i.e. to the role in the game and its rules, therefore, the highest achievements of the child are possible in the game, which tomorrow will become his average real level, his morality. Now we can say about the child’s activity the same thing that we said about things. Just as there is a fraction - thing/meaning, there is also a fraction - action/meaning.

If earlier the dominant moment was action, now this structure is overturned and meaning becomes the numerator, and action the denominator.

It is important to understand what kind of liberation a child receives from actions in a game when this action becomes instead of a real one, for example, eating, by moving his fingers, i.e. when an action is performed not for the sake of the action, but for the sake of the meaning that it denotes.

In a preschool child, at first the action is dominant over its meaning, misunderstanding of this action; The child can do more than understand. In preschool age, for the first time, a structure of action arises in which meaning is decisive; but the action itself is not a side, subordinate moment, but a structural moment. Zero showed that the children ate from a plate, making a series of movements with their hands that resembled real food, but actions that could not mean eating at all became impossible. Throwing your arms back, instead of pulling them towards the plate, became impossible, i.e. this had a disruptive effect on the game. The child does not symbolize in the game, but wishes, fulfills the desire, passes through the experience the main categories of reality, which is why a day is played out in the game in half an hour, 100 miles are covered in five steps. The child, wishing, performs, thinking, acts; inseparability of internal action from external: imagination, comprehension and will, i.e. internal processes in external action.

The main thing is the meaning of the action, but the action itself is not indifferent. At an early age the situation was the opposite, i.e. the action was structurally determining, and the meaning was a secondary, secondary, subordinate moment. The same thing that we said about the separation of meaning from the object applies to the child’s own actions: a child who, standing still, tramples, imagining that he is riding a horse, thereby commits an overturning of a fraction - an action / meaning on meaning / action.

Again, in order to separate the meaning of an action from the real action (to ride a horse without being able to do it), the child needs a support point in the form of a substitute real action. But again, if earlier in the structure “action - meaning” the action was decisive, now the structure is overturned and the meaning becomes decisive. The action is relegated to the background, becomes a fulcrum - again the meaning is torn away from the action with the help of another action. This is again a repeated point on the path to pure manipulation of the meanings of actions, i.e. to volitional choice, decision, struggle of motives and other processes sharply separated from execution, i.e. the path to will, just as operating with the meanings of things is the path to abstract thinking - after all, in a volitional decision, the determining point is not the execution of the action itself, but its meaning. In a game, an action replaces another action, like a thing replaces another thing. How does a child “melt” one thing into another, one action into another? This is carried out through movement in a semantic field, not connected by a visible field, by real things, which subjugates all real things and real actions.

This movement in the semantic field is the most important thing in the game: on the one hand, it is movement in an abstract field (the field, therefore, appears earlier than arbitrary manipulation of meanings), but the method of movement is situational, concrete (i.e., not logical , but an affective movement). In other words, a semantic field arises, but movement in it occurs in the same way as in the real one - this is the main genetic contradiction of the game. It remains for me to answer three questions: firstly, to show that play is not the predominant, but the leading moment in the development of a child, and secondly, to show what the development of the game itself consists of, i.e. what does it mean to move from the predominance of an imaginary situation to the predominance of a rule; and third, to show what internal transformations play produces in a child’s development.

I think that play is not the predominant type of activity of a child. In basic life situations, the child behaves diametrically opposite to how he behaves in the game. In his game, action is subordinated to meaning, but in real life, action, of course, dominates over meaning.

Thus, we have in the game, if you like, the negative of the child’s general life behavior. Therefore, it would be completely groundless to consider the game as the prototype of his life activity, as the predominant form. This is the main drawback of Koffka's theory, which considers play as another world of the child. Everything that relates to a child, according to Koffka, is play reality. What applies to an adult is a serious reality. The same thing in the game has one meaning, outside of it it has a different meaning. In the children's world, the logic of desires, the logic of satisfying drives, dominates, and not real logic. The illusory nature of the game is transferred to life. This would be so if play were the child's predominant form of activity; but it is difficult to imagine what kind of picture from a madhouse a child would resemble if this form of activity that we are talking about were, at least to some extent, transferred into real life and became the predominant form of the child’s life activity.

Koffka gives a number of examples of how a child transfers a play situation into life. But the real transfer of gaming behavior into life can only be considered as a painful symptom. To behave in a real situation as if in an illusory one means to give rise to the initial germs of delusion.

As the study shows, gaming behavior in life is normally observed when the game is in the nature of sisters playing sisters, i.e. children, sitting at a real dinner, can play dinner, or (in the example given by Katz) children who do not want to go to bed say: “Let’s play as if it’s night, we need to go to bed”; they begin to play at what they are actually doing, obviously creating some other relationship, thereby making it easier to carry out the unpleasant action.

Thus, it seems to me that play is not the predominant type of activity in preschool age. Only in theories that consider the child not as a being who satisfies the basic requirements of life, but as a being who lives in search of pleasures, strives to satisfy these pleasures, can the idea arise that the children's world is a play world.

Is it possible for a child’s behavior to be such that he always acts according to meaning? Is it possible for a preschooler to behave so dryly that he doesn’t behave the way he wants with candy, just because of the thought that he should behave differently? Such obedience to rules is a completely impossible thing in life; in the game it becomes possible; Thus, play creates the child’s zone of proximal development. In play, the child is always above his average age, above his usual everyday behavior; In the game he seems to be head and shoulders above himself. The game in condensed form contains, as if in the focus of a magnifying glass, all development trends; The child in the game seems to be trying to make a leap above the level of his usual behavior.

The relationship of play to development should be compared with the relationship of learning to development. Behind the game are changes in needs and changes in consciousness of a more general nature. Play is a source of development and creates a zone of proximal development. Action in an imaginary field, in an imaginary situation, the creation of an arbitrary intention, the formation of a life plan, volitional motives - all this arises in the game and puts it at the highest level of development, lifts it to the crest of a wave, makes it the ninth wave of development of preschool age, which rises throughout deep waters, but relatively calm.

Essentially, a child moves through play activities. Only in this sense can play be called a leading activity, i.e. determining the development of the child.

The second question is how is the game moving? It is remarkable that the child begins with an imaginary situation, and this imaginary situation is initially very close to the real situation. There is a reproduction of the real situation. Let's say a child, playing with dolls, almost repeats what his mother does with him; The doctor just looked at the child’s throat, hurt him, he screamed, but as soon as the doctor left, he immediately puts a spoon in the doll’s mouth.

This means that in the initial situation the rule is in a highly compressed, crumpled form. The imaginary itself in The situation is also extremely little imaginary. It is an imaginary situation, but it becomes understandable in its relation to the real situation that just happened, i.e. it is a memory of something that happened. The game is more like memory than imagination, i.e. it is rather a memory in action than a new imaginary situation. As the game develops, we move in the direction that the goal of the game is realized.

It is wrong to imagine that play is an activity without a goal; play is the child's goal activity. In sports games there is a win or a loss, you can be first and you can be second or last. In short, the goal decides the game. The goal becomes what everything else is done for. The goal, as the final point, determines the child’s affective attitude towards the game; running in a race, a child can become very worried and very upset; there may be little remaining of his pleasure, because it is physically difficult for him to run, and if he is outpaced, he will experience little functional pleasure. By the end of the game in sports games, the goal becomes one of the dominant moments of the game, without which the game loses its meaning as much as looking at some tasty candy, putting it in the mouth, chewing it and spitting it back out.

In the game, the goal set in advance is realized - who will finish first.

At the end of development, a rule appears, and the stricter it is, the more it requires adaptation from the child, the more it regulates the child’s activity, the more intense and acute the game becomes. Simply running around without a goal, without rules of the game, is a sluggish game that does not excite the children.

Zero simplified the rules of the croquet game for children. He shows how it demagnetizes, i.e. how for a child the game loses its meaning as the rules disappear. Consequently, by the end of development, what was in embryo at the beginning appears clearly in the game. The goal is the rules. This was there before, but in a collapsed form. There is one more point that is very significant for a sports game - this is a certain record, which is also very related to the goal.

Let's take chess for example. It is pleasant to win a chess game and unpleasant for a real player to lose it. Zero says that it is as pleasant for a child to be the first to run, as it is pleasant for a beautiful person to look at himself in the mirror; It gives you some feeling of satisfaction.

Consequently, a complex of qualities arises that comes forward at the end of the development of the game as much as it is collapsed at the beginning; moments that are secondary or incidental at the beginning become central at the end and vice versa - the moments that are dominant at the beginning become secondary at the end.

Finally, the third question is: what kind of changes in the child’s behavior does the game produce? In play, the child is free, i.e. he determines his actions based on his “I”. But this is an illusory freedom. He subordinates his actions to a certain meaning, he acts based on the meaning of a thing.

The child learns to be aware of his own actions, to realize that every thing matters.

The fact of creating an imaginary situation from a developmental point of view can be considered as a path to the development of abstract thinking; the rule associated with this, it seems to me, leads to the development of the child’s actions, on the basis of which the division of play and labor that we encounter at school age becomes possible as a basic fact.

I would also like to draw attention to one point: play is truly a feature of preschool age.

According to the figurative expression of one of the researchers, the play of a child under three years of age has the character of a serious game, just like the play of a teenager, in a different, of course, sense of the word; The serious play of a young child is that he plays without separating the imaginary situation from the real one.

For a schoolchild, play begins to exist in the form of a limited form of activity, mainly such as sports games, which play a certain role in the general development of the schoolchild, but do not have the same significance that play has for a preschooler.

In appearance, the game bears little resemblance to what it leads to, and only an internal, deep analysis of it makes it possible to determine the process of its movement and its role in the development of a preschooler.

At school age, play does not die, but penetrates into the relationship to reality. It has its internal continuation in schooling and work (compulsory activities with a rule). The entire consideration of the essence of the game showed us that in the game a new relationship is created between the semantic field, i.e. between the situation in thought and the real situation.

Based on materials from the Journal of the Psychological Society named after. L.S. Vygotsky."

Origin and types of game

The game arises in the course of the historical development of society as a result changes in the child’s place in the system of social relations(Arkin, 1935; Elkonin, 1978). The higher the development of society, the more the duration of childhood increases, that is, children accept later and later Active participation in the lives of adults, and the more difficult the period of preparing a child for adulthood becomes. If in primitive society education is not singled out as a special social function, since children very early, from 3-5 years of age, are included in the productive labor of adults and very quickly become independent (Mead, 1931; Alt, 1956), then in modern society, in connection with the complication of means of labor and production relations, production arises special items for children - toys that help, during role-playing games, to master the social functions of objects and master the skills necessary for future work activities. The child “grows” into the world of adults through play activity, which reproduces the life of society (Elkonin, 1978). Interaction with toys is for a child interaction with the world of human things. It is important that this interaction is always initiated and organized by an adult, who provides a model of action, emotionally reinforces (approves or disapproves) manipulations with objects or toys that replace them. At the same time, many toys are aimed not at mastering certain work skills, but at developing general abilities necessary for various types of future activities: dexterity, fine motor skills, visual-motor coordination, precision of movements, etc. It is characteristic that the functions and contents of toys are the same among different peoples with different living conditions and with different levels of development. “...A child born and growing up in the culture of the 20th century often uses as a source of joy and a tool for his development and self-education the same toy that is the property of a child born from people who, in their mental development, are close to the inhabitants caves and pile buildings, and growing in conditions of the most primitive existence. And these children of eras of humanity so distant from each other demonstrate their deep inner closeness by the fact that they not only receive or themselves create similar toys, but - what is even more amazing, by the fact that they make the same use out of them... The human child, like and his toys, manifests its unity in the unity of human developmental traits” (Arkin, 1935, pp. 32 and 49). But this statement is true only for the so-called “original toys”, such as a ball, a top, weapons, dolls and images of animals. But these toys, their forms and significance for children’s play change historically as the child’s place in society changes (Elkonin, 1978). Thus, play arises in response to the needs of the society in which children live and of which they must become active members. “The game is not a world of fantasy and convention, but rather a world of reality and unconditionality, only recreated by special means” (Ibid., p. 221).

The first game of early childhood - object game(games-exercises in the classification of Piaget, 1969), growing from objective actions (manipulative actions with objects) in parallel with the assimilation of historically established methods of action and functions of real objects in the context of communication between an adult and a child. “... A child lives in a society of people and in an environment of human objects, each of which is assigned a specific, socially developed method of action, the bearer of which is an adult... The method of action with an object can be mastered by a child only through a model, and the meaning of the action - only through the inclusion of action in the system of interpersonal relations” (Elkonin, 1978, p. 138). An adult, in joint activity, helps the child turn a figurative toy that imitates a real object from an object into a toy itself. In this process, according to Elkonin, differentiation of the signified and the signified and the birth of a symbol - an individual designation that contains elements of the image of the object - occur. A necessary condition for the emergence of object games is the formation of sensorimotor coordination during the manipulation of real objects in the first year of life in interaction with an adult, stimulating concentration on the object, orientation in space when grasping it, orientation in the physical form of the object, etc.

“A child who masters the world around him is a child who strives to act in this world. Therefore, in the course of developing his awareness of the objective world, the child strives to enter into an effective relationship not only with things directly accessible to him, but also with the wider world, that is, he strives to act like an adult” (Leontyev, 1965, p. 471). An adult speaks to a child, first of all, from the perspective of his functions. Play arises when unrealizable immediate tendencies appear and at the same time the tendency toward the immediate realization of desires, characteristic of early childhood, remains. In object play, according to Vygotsky (1966), illusory realization of unrealizable desires and the imagination function is formed. The game is the realization of generalized unconscious affects. Their main content is the system of relationships with adults. (Vygotsky, 1966).

In the game, items acquire special game sense, which is saved until the end of the game. The emergence of playful meaning gives rise to imaginary situation which is characterized by the transfer of meanings from one object to another and actions that recreate real actions in a generalized and abbreviated form.

Unlike manipulations with real objects, a child in object play operates with generalized meanings of objects, with general patterns of using objects in various situations. The meaning is thus divorced from the object, but not from the real action with the object. The repetition of actions inherent in the game contributes to their assimilation. In this case, the action is separated from the object, only the pattern of movements is reproduced: cradling a cube or feeding a kitten with a spoon, repeating the familiar actions of the mother. Thus, there arises substitution- playful use of an object.

A special role belongs to verbal designation depicted action. “For a child, each word, as it were, contains a possible system of actions, and thereby the peculiarity of the object or phenomenon to which he relates the word itself. The connection of a word with an object and the connection of possible actions with a word shows that the word, in its content, acts for the speaker as a mode of action with the named object or phenomenon” (Lukov, 1937, p. 10). However, this connection between a word and a system of actions is dynamic and depends on the child’s age, experience with objects and the conditions of the game. As the game develops, the relationship between the object, word and action changes in gaming activity. At the same time, these relationships may be specifically influenced by the characteristics of the psychophysical development of children, for example, deafness: in deaf children, verbal regulation of play actions requires special training (Vygotskaya, 1966).

Already in the first studies of children's play, it was noted that, imitating the actions of adults, the child does not passively follow the model, but actively assigns functions to actions with objects the external world (Stern, 1922). Therefore, the game object must be partially familiar and at the same time have unknown possibilities, that is, contain the possibility of imagery and fantasy (Buytendijk, 1933). If the object is unfamiliar, then the play action is preceded by an orienting reaction and exploratory behavior (Hinde, 1975). If an object is completely familiar, the child may quickly become bored with it unless he discovers some new properties of the object that stimulate exploratory behavior that turns into play (Voss & Keller, 1986).

In object games great importance have also replacement items, that is, non-specific objects (cubes, sticks, etc.) that replace missing toys. The cube can become a doll, a stroller or a car for her, a bottle from which she drinks, etc. Such objects are very important for the development of a child’s imagination and a more in-depth knowledge of the functions of objects in the outside world. At the same time, as L. S. Vygotsky wrote, “a ball of rags or a piece of wood becomes a small child in play, because they allow the same gestures that depict carrying a small child in your arms or feeding him. The child’s own movement, his own gesture is what gives the function of a sign to the corresponding object, what gives it meaning” (Vygotsky, 1935, p. 78). Therefore, some physical properties of nonspecific objects may limit their playful use, for example, a ball that does not have fixed coordinates is poorly suited for depicting a child (Lukov, 1937).

Thus, substitution (playful use of an object) can occur by transferring an action to a new situation (feeding a doll), or performing the same action with a substitute object (cradling a cube). Thus, the game actions already contain elements of the role. “The path of game development goes from specific objective actions to generalized game action and from it to role-playing action: there is spoon; feed spoon doll; feed a doll with a spoon, how is your mom,- this is the schematic path to role-playing game” (Elkonin, 1978, p. 187, author’s emphasis).

The first form of play in the preschool period is director's play(Kozharina, 2001), including organizing the game space, connecting several objects with meaning, coming up with lines for each character, naming the properties of the game object (“sick doll”). The latter is possible only after the adult names the object and/or performs an action with this object (Fradkina, 1946). The child controls the toy and acts through it.

This game meets the child's need to actively influence surrounding objects. The child begins to manipulate objects not because of their attractiveness, but by endowing objects (often non-specific, with neutral properties) game values and bringing these meanings into the game situation. At the same time, as L. S. Vygotsky pointed out, what is important is not the resemblance of an object to the designated creature or animal, but its functional use, the ability to manipulate it, to give the object (or a wide variety of objects) the function of a sign using a gesture. “So, for a child, a stick becomes a riding horse, because it can be placed between the legs, and a gesture can be applied to it that will indicate that the stick in this case means a horse” (Vygotsky 1983, p. 182). Therefore, L. S. Vygotsky called this form of play “symbolic” (ibid.). Gradually, these objects not only replace the creatures they signify, but also point to them, maintaining their acquired meaning. conditional items and relationships. “Here we encounter what is perhaps the most interesting feature of children's play - the transformation of the most insignificant and unpromising things into real living beings” (Selli, 1901, p. 51). The brevity and generalization of gaming actions is the most important condition for modeling social relations in gaming activities (Elkonin, 1978). Game actions are subject to the logic of real life relationships: a car-chair, for example, stops at a red light.

The volume of characters and the size of the playing space should be small so that the baby can keep them in his field of vision and memory. “It is easy to see how the play behavior of a child becomes more complicated, as he must constantly hold two positions simultaneously: the position of the director (supra-situational, supra-game) and the position of the player, role-playing (sometimes even several roles). In director's play, the child's initiative and ability to act from within are worked out and strengthened, and for the first time the second component of volitional behavior appears - meaningfulness (the child gives meaning to neutral objects - cubes, sticks, etc. and connects them together with a plot). These two components of volitional behavior (initiative and meaningfulness) are aimed mainly at external objects; with their help, the child learns to master the play situation...” (Kozharina, 2001, p. 292). Director's play can be considered a transitional stage to the emergence of a plot-role-playing game, the new formation of which is the appearance of a logically connected chain of actions combined into one complex action.

In middle preschool age (4 years), children develop a new type of play: figurative- a symbolic game in Piaget’s classification (Piaget, Inhelder, 1966), when children transform into role-images (bunny, doctor, car, etc.) and subordinate their actions to the nature of the role-image. Initiative is filled with the meaning of the image-role. When playing a role-image, the child uses different means of representation: speech, action, facial expressions, gestures, external attributes of the image, etc. “This type of game allows the child to see the range of his capabilities, to try himself in different “faces” and roles” (Kozharina , 2001, p. 293) and opens up new opportunities for the child to understand reality and master his behavior, speech, facial expressions, movements, etc. - necessary components for the formation of a full-fledged role-playing game in the future. “If in director’s play the child’s initiative is mediated by external objects..., then in figurative role-playing the child’s body (including speech, facial expressions and pantomime) is the means of mediation. Two components of volitional behavior - meaningfulness and initiative - are combined..." (ibid.). The child creates a special meaningful situation, being its center. At the same time, both the images and the roles into which the child transforms are absolutely not similar to the performer, i.e. the imaginary situation is qualitatively different from the real situation (cars talk to each other, the traffic light goes for a walk, etc.) (Sysoeva, 2003 ).

By older preschool age (5 years) it appears role-playing game- independent full-fledged play activity according to D. B. Elkonin, “as placing oneself in the world and as a reflection of the world in oneself” (Kravtsov, 2001, p. 297). The imaginary situation and role give new meaning to previous actions with objects, making them long-lasting and emotionally intense. “Children’s play, which contains a role and an imaginary situation as its general background, is fundamentally different from those cases of play when they do not exist at all” (Slavina, 1948, p. 26). The difference is that “objects and actions with them are now included in new system the child’s relationship to reality, into new affective and attractive activity” (Elkonin, 1978, p. 276). It is also important that “the role is introduced into the child’s actions as if from the outside, through story toys that suggest the human meaning of actions with them; ... the role is the semantic center of the game, and both the created game situation and game actions are used for its implementation” (Ibid., p. 182). At the same time, it is not enough to have the ability to reproduce the corresponding action with an object; an emotional attitude towards the character represented by the toy - the object of the action - is necessary. In other words, taking on the role of a mother involves not only reproducing the action of feeding or bathing, but also demonstrating love for the doll/child or, conversely, reproaching and punishing it.

Prerequisites for role-playing games as mentioned above, they also arise at an earlier age, but younger children, playing out roles in an imaginary situation, are not yet capable of developing a plot (“the nanny in kindergarten prepares lunch, but does not offer it to the dolls”). In children with intellectual development delays or speech, vision and hearing impairments, role-playing play does not occur without special, detailed and long-term formation (in joint activities with adults, and then independently) of generalized play actions, transferring them to new objects, connecting play actions with the role and creating a chain of actions (Sokolyansky, 1962; Vygotskaya, 1966; Sokolova, 1973). This path is more extended in time (for example, in deaf-blind children, role-playing play is formed only by the age of 8-9), but it goes through the same stages and has the same patterns as in children with normal development.

Role-playing, as the leading play activity of a child, is given the greatest attention in psychological literature. Back in 1901, J. Selley identified two main features of this type of game: 1. transformation of oneself and surrounding objects and the transition to an imaginary world; 2. deep absorption in the creation of this fiction and life in it. V. Stern also wrote about these same psychological phenomena of children's play: “When you see... with what seriousness he (the child) acts in his games and in what despair he comes if he is disturbed, then you cannot help but admit that here there is still a complete or almost complete illusion of reality” (Stern, 1922, p. 151). However, both L. S. Vygotsky (1967) and D. B. Elkonin (1978) objected to the explanation of role-playing play by the intensive development of imagination in childhood. It, like other mental functions, is formed and developed in the game.

A. S. Spivakovskaya (1981) connects the emergence of role-playing games with the 3-year-old crisis, i.e., with the contradiction between the increased need for independence and insufficient opportunities to realize this need. Mastering new patterns of adult behavior becomes a moment of self-affirmation for the child (Chateau, 1956). “By now, enough facts have already accumulated in child psychology showing that the relationship between a child and an adult is developing. During this development, under the guidance of adults, the child's emancipation occurs. Each step in this emancipation is at the same time a new form of connection between the child and adults” (Elkonin, 1978, p. 105). The formula of three-year-olds “I am Myself” is rebuilt in the game into the formula “We are together” (Spivakovskaya, 1981).

Play thus satisfies the child's needs for individual autonomy and community with others (Buytendijk, 1933). “The child begins to realize himself as a subject of his activity; in a role-playing game he is simultaneously both a player, fulfilling a certain role (doctor, driver, teacher), obeying the rules of the game, and a subject that exists and is outside the meaning playing field and monitoring the implementation of the rules of the game” (Kozharina, 2001, p. 293). It is important that the child reproduces the functions and relationships of adults in conditions created by himself, in which real objects are replaced by toys or the meaning of one object is transferred to another object, and it is used in accordance with the new meaning given to it to model not only actions with objects, but also relationships between people. “The child sees the activity of the adults around him, imitates it and transfers it into play, in play he masters basic social relationships and goes through the school of his future social development” (Vygotsky, 1931, p. 459). The roles reflect a generalized picture of relationships in the form of a position corresponding to this role. Mastering a role means mastering the rules of the game, as well as the expectations and demands made by other participants in the game (“role in action” according to F. I. Fradkina).

P. P. Blonsky (1934) noted that not only the child himself plays some role (for example, puffs like a steam locomotive), but also ascribes some roles to other adults, children and even inanimate objects, for example, composed chairs become carriages , in which the “passengers” sit.

D. B. Elkonin (1978) suggests distinguishing game plot- the area of ​​reality reproduced by children, and game content- the central characteristic moment of activity and relationships between adults, reproduced in the game. The richer the child’s ideas about the relationships and activities of adults, the more varied the plots of the game. Based on the content of the game, one can judge the degree of penetration of the child into the world of adults. According to E. A. Arkin, the development of games in preschool age is characterized by the fact that “from plotless, consisting of a series of often unrelated episodes, in children of three or four years old they turn into games with a specific plot, increasingly complex and developing more and more systematically” (Arkin, 1948, p. 256). The development of the plot also includes its substantive implementation, for example, the creation of a house for a doll. The plot of the game develops from conveying the external side of phenomena to conveying their meaning (Mendzheritskaya, 1946). In the game plot invented by the child, his creative abilities are most clearly manifested.

With the same plot of the game, children of different ages reproduce different content, in which the number of actions and the possibility of naming the role changes, the correspondence of the game action to the real action is reflected in different ways, the logic of actions is observed to varying degrees, interpersonal relationships and the interrelation of roles are conveyed and verbalized ( Elkonin, 1978). This leads to a more or less clear fulfillment of the chosen role.

In addition, the specific experience and living conditions of the child determine whether the content of his play with the doll will be dominated by relationships of love, goodwill and patience or suppression, rude command and threats. A visually impaired child puts glasses on a bear. Play can also serve as affective compensation, allowing, for example, the child to play a leadership role that is prohibited or suppressed in real life (Claparede, 1934). Thus, the content of the game reveals its social origin to the greatest extent. Play is a natural means for a child to express himself, express his feelings and problems (Axline, 1947).

In the development of the game's plot, they also note change in influence of toys: For children three to four years old, they determine the plot of the game. Older preschoolers either “play for a toy” or do without it (Usova, 1947). From replaying actions of the character being portrayed, the child becomes more and more to the image of relationships with him. “The meaning of play changes for children of different age groups. For younger children, it is in the actions of the person whose role the child plays; for the average - in the relationship of this person to others; for elders - in a typical relationship, a person whose role is performed by the child” (Elkonin, 1978, p. 202). First of all, according to D. B. Elkonin, the relationship of a close adult to a child is realized and depicted, then the relationship of adults to each other and, lastly, the child’s relationship to adults, as an indicator of the formation of his self-awareness. In the game, these relationships are not only reproduced, but also clarified, comprehended, and filled with specific content and personal meaning. At the same time, children’s relationships in play are a school of real relationships, “a school of concessions and tolerance” (Spivakovskaya, 1981, p. 91).

The meaning of the role also changes with age, which in younger children is merged with action and objects, while in older children it is mediated by relationships, conventional rules and is of a consciously conditional nature (Elkonin, 1978).

In the structure of a role-playing game, game operations, game actions and game roles are also distinguished (Spivakovskaya, 1981). Gaming Operations- real movements made in the game and adapted to the objects with which children play. Game actions correspond to the child’s ideas that encourage him to play. Role- reproducing the actions of an adult in the game.

Collective character Role-playing games expand the semantic field of the child’s activity and the possibilities of self-mastery. The imaginary situation becomes a means of reflecting the image of another and one’s own relationship with him. In this case, the real relationships of the game participants and the game relationships (corresponding to the accepted role) may not coincide. “Highlighting children’s real relationships with each other in the game is the practice of their collective actions” (Elkonin, 1978, p. 11). In real relationships with others in role-playing play, the child shows, forms and changes his emotional and personal qualities: the desire for leadership or timidity, aggression or caring for others, thoroughness and perseverance in fulfilling the role or negligence, absent-mindedness, indifference to others, etc. .

The group acts in relation to each participant in the game as an organizing and regulating principle that controls the correct fulfillment of the accepted role by each child.

Game actions become competitive in a group of children. This reinforces in the minds of children moral norms and rules of human relationships that lead to success, and, conversely, forms of behavior that are dangerous for effective interaction. “The game is a school of morality, but not morality in performance, but morality in action” (Elkonin, 1978, p. 288). All this constitutes fundamental moments in the formation of a child’s personality and communication.

The content of the role played, as a rule, causes deep emotional experiences of the child, therefore this type of game has a great influence on the formation of the child’s emotional sphere, as well as his orientation in the world of meanings and motives for an adult’s activities, moral norms and rules. It is in this sense that D. B. Elkonin (1978) spoke of the role as an indissoluble unity of the affective-motivational and operational-technical aspects of activity. The play activities of older preschoolers are distinguished by rich facial expressions, expressiveness of gestures, emotional coloring of speech, and a variety of intonations.

As the child develops, the child’s awareness of his role also changes and, in older preschool age, a critical attitude toward his own performance of the role and toward the similar activities of his playmates arises.

In role-playing play, therefore, the most important new formations of preschool age are developed: developed imagination, elements of voluntary behavior, sign-symbolic functions.

By the age of 6, children master the most complex type of game in terms of the development of voluntary behavior - a game with rules. The child’s initiative, his actions and relationships with other children are mediated by certain rules of the game, which are stipulated, discussed (understood) before the game, before the start of action. The rules are determined by the basic content of the role and become more complex as the content of the accepted role develops and becomes more complex. A game with a detailed plot and rules hidden in the roles (the locomotive is traveling) develops into a game with open rules and a collapsed game situation (the locomotive is traveling on a conditional signal - 2 bells) (Elkonin, 1978).

In other words, the child moves from games with real content to games with a conditional implementation of rules that are not determined by the real social relations of a role-playing game. “The rules grow out of the plot, are isolated from it, then are generalized and take on the character of the rules themselves” (Ibid., p. 270).

Play with rules by the end of preschool age arises under the influence of design, regardless of toys. From a game where each child plays in his own way, he moves on to a game where the actions of all children are coordinated, and their interaction is determined by the role they take on. The generalized role is increasingly individualized and typified (Rudik, 1948); the child comes to full awareness of himself as a subject of activity. He can comprehend not only his behavior, but also give meaning to what other children are doing, build a game scenario taking others into account, distributing roles in accordance with the logic of the situation, being in a supra-situational position. The rule appears for the child as connected with the play partner, that is, it appears as social in its content. From individual self-affirmation, the child comes to social self-affirmation in and through the group (Chateau, 1956).

Therefore, this type of game is a prototype of the child’s future educational activity. “Rules are a school of will (work for a schoolchild), an imaginary situation is the path to abstraction” (From a letter from L. S. Vygotsky to D. B. Elkonin, April 1933. Quoted from Elkonin, 1978, p. 7). According to D. B. Elkonin (1978), the appearance of an attitude towards a rule as a conditional one is one of the signs of a child’s readiness for school.

Mastering school subjects requires the child to be able to relate to a sign as denoting a certain reality, that is, the formation of a symbolic function (Hetzer, 1926). This was experimentally confirmed in the study of L. S. Vygotsky (1935).

One of the types of games with rules that occupy great place In the life of schoolchildren and persisting in adults, are sports games. For children, they are an important source of motor development. In addition, sports games serve for many children as a way to channel hyperactivity and aggression, and also often as a means of compensating for failure in other school disciplines (Mouly, 1967). These games, in addition to the above functions, acquire special importance in the family for the formation of parent-child relationships, as well as for training important components of the child’s emotional sphere: the ability to enjoy the success of another, an adequate reaction to one’s own failure, the ability to interact, the desire to achieve, etc. d.

In the development and complication of the game, 3 main points are distinguished: 1) the deployment and designation of conditional objective actions; 2) role behavior - designation and implementation of a conditional playing position and 3) plot position - the deployment of a sequence of integral situations, their designation and planning (Mikhailenko, 1975).

Each type of game, being leading at a certain stage of preschool development, does not disappear subsequently, but develops within another type of game. Moreover, at different ages the motive for the same type of game may be different. For example, in the well-known game of hide and seek, older children are guided primarily by the motive of following the rules of the game, and for younger children the leading motive is communication with an adult, which makes him shout “I’m here” when the adult pretends that he cannot find him . Gender differences in preferences for different types of games have also been revealed: girls are more attracted to role-playing games, and boys are more attracted to director's games and games with rules (Kravtsov, 2001).

A special and effective type of game is dramatization(theatrical play) - games depicting specific characters and events, where children simultaneously act as an active character and a spectator, and in both roles they emotionally identify themselves with the hero, empathize with him, help him and at the same time change themselves. A timid and shy kid becomes a hero, defeating all enemies, a simple-minded - sly fox etc. Various roles allow the child to gain and master invaluable experience of various social relationships, and to find means for their expression. “While remaining a game, dramatization is subject to different motives compared to role-playing. Here, for children, it becomes more important not the process of play action, but the result, and the result is not material, but emotional... Dramatization is the arbitrary conscious creative mood of the child, which is regulated and directed by ideas about people and events. In such a game, new motives and incentives for behavior arise for children’s activities. This is the influence on other people characteristic of any truly creative process” (Spivakovskaya, 1981, p. 58).

Special mention should be made educational games, solving various educational and developmental tasks and incorporating children’s gaming experience into the learning situation. They can be both role-playing and games with rules. Of all the existing variety of different types of games, it is didactic games that are most closely connected with the educational process. They are used as one of the ways to teach various academic subjects, primarily in primary school. Didactic game- This is an activity through which children learn. The didactic game is a means approved in pedagogical practice and theory for expanding, deepening and consolidating knowledge. In addition, a didactic game, like every game, is an independent activity that children willingly engage in. It can be individual, group or collective.

Didactic games mainly belong to the type of “games with rules”. The game process is subordinated to the solution of a didactic task, which is always related to a specific topic of the curriculum. It provides for the need to master the knowledge necessary to implement the game's concept.

The educational task in a didactic game is not directly posed to the children, so they usually talk about the involuntary assimilation of educational material. The dual nature of the didactic game - educational orientation and game form - increases the child's interest, stimulates and increases the effectiveness of mastering specific educational material.

Didactic games differ from didactic exercises in the presence of mandatory elements: game concept, didactic task, game action and rules.

Game concept And game action make didactic games an attractive, desirable and emotional activity. Game concept can be expressed in the name of the game itself and in game task, by solving which children begin to understand the practical application of the knowledge they have acquired. Game design determines character game action, and play action allows children to learn as they play. Rules help guide game process. They regulate the behavior of children and their relationships with each other. The results of the game are always obvious, concrete and visual. Compliance with the rules obliges children to independently perform play actions, and at the same time they develop criteria for assessing the behavior of their play partners and their own.

Working on a didactic task requires the activation of all mental activity of the child. Cognitive processes, thinking, memory, and imagination develop. Mental activity is improved, including carrying out various operations in their unity. The student’s attention becomes more focused, stable, and the ability to distribute it correctly appears.

Depending on what materials are used in didactic games, they are divided into object games(lotto, dominoes, etc.), subject-verbal but only verbal, setting a task and allowing it to be solved only verbally.

One of the modern games for learning (along with computer games, games with mechanized toys, etc.) are programmed educational games. In them, the game action takes place using elementary technology - in response to the action performed, feedback appears through a sound or light signal. Based on this signal, the child controls how correctly he follows certain rules (Ilieva and Tsoneva, 1989). Depending on the cognitive content, didactic games help to master various types of knowledge: spelling, arithmetic, geometric, etc.

Didactic games can be used for an individual game in which the child competes with his past result in the game, and also didactic games can be played by a group of children consisting of two or more people, and then the moment of competition in the game further enhances the effectiveness of learning material.

Vyatka State Humanitarian University

Test work on child psychology on the topic :

The importance of play for a child’s mental development

Work completed

2nd year student

Part-time study

PP groups – 21

Specialties: Pedagogy and psychology

Bushueva Olga Sergeevna.

Kirov, 2008

Introduction

1. Meaning and types of games

2. The role of play in the mental development of a child

3. Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Preschool childhood is a large period of a child’s life. Living conditions at this time are rapidly expanding: the boundaries of the family are expanding to the limits of the street, city, and country. The child discovers the world of human relationships, different types of activities and social functions of people. He feels a strong desire to be involved in this adult life, to actively participate in it, which, of course, is not yet available to him. In addition, he strives no less strongly for independence. From this contradiction, role-playing play is born - an independent activity of children that models the life of adults.

The whole life of a preschooler is connected with play. Mastering the things around him, relationships between people, understanding the meanings that social life carries, the work and responsibilities of adults - he gets acquainted with all this while playing, imagining himself in the role of mom, dad, and so on.

The study of children's development shows that all mental processes develop more effectively in play than in other types of activities.

L. S. Vygotsky, considering the role of play in the mental development of a child, noted that in connection with the transition to school, play not only does not disappear, but, on the contrary, it permeates all the student’s activities.

Play is the activity most mastered by children. In it they draw models for solving new life problems that arise in knowledge and work.

In preschool age, play becomes the leading activity, but not because the modern child, as a rule, spends most of his time in entertaining games - play causes qualitative changes in the child’s psyche.

In play activities, the preschooler not only replaces objects, but also takes on one or another role and begins to act in accordance with this role. Most often he portrays adults: mom, dad, driver, pilot. In the game, the child discovers for the first time the relationships that exist between people in the process of their work, their rights and responsibilities.

Goal: to identify the significance of the game for the mental development of the child.

Objectives: 1. Analyze the literature on this topic;

2. Summarize the results obtained.

1. Meaning and types of games

Play activity is a natural need of a child, which is based on intuitive imitation of adults. Play is necessary to prepare the younger generation for work; it can become one of the active methods of teaching and education.

The game is special kind human activity. It arises in response to the social need to prepare the younger generation for life.

For games to become a true organizer of people’s lives, their active activities, their interests and needs, it is necessary that the practice of education should include a richness and variety of games. Children's life can be interesting and meaningful if children have the opportunity to play different games and constantly replenish their gaming baggage.

Each individual type of game has numerous variations. Children are very creative. They complicate and simplify well-known games, come up with new rules and details. They are not passive towards games. For them this is always creative inventive activity.

Children's games for the entire period of the Soviet formation were not collected, not generalized, which means they were not classified. The famous psychologist A. N. Leontiev was right when he asserted: “... in order to approach the analysis of a child’s specific play activity, one must take the path not of a formal list of the games that he plays, but to penetrate into their actual psychology, into the meaning of the game for the child. Only then will the development of the game appear for us in its true inner content.”

The most common game theories in the 19th and 20th centuries:

K. Gross believed that play is the unconscious preparation of a young organism for life.

K. Schiller, G. Spencer explained the game as a simple waste of excess energy accumulated by the child. It is not spent on labor and therefore is expressed in play actions.

K. Büller emphasized the usual enthusiasm with which children play and argued that the whole meaning of the game lies in the pleasure that it gives the child.

S. Freud believed that a child is motivated to play by a feeling of his own inferiority.

Although the above explanations of the game seem to be different, all these authors argue that the basis of the game is the instinctive, biological needs of the child: his drives and desires.

Russian and Soviet scientists take a fundamentally different approach to explaining the game:

A. I. Sikorsky, P. F. Kapterev, P. F. Lesgat, K. D. Ushinsky speak out for the uniqueness of the game as a truly human activity.

N.K. Krupskaya, A.S. Makarenko, and then many teachers and psychologists deepened the analysis of the game and strictly scientifically explained this unique children's activity.

Children's games are characterized by the following features:

1. the game is a form of active reflection by the child of the people around him.

2. a distinctive feature of the game is the very method that the child uses in this activity

3. the game, like any other human activity, has a social character, so it changes with changes in the historical conditions of people’s lives

4. play is a form of creative reflection of reality by the child.

5. play is the manipulation of knowledge, a means of clarification and enrichment, a way of exercise, and therefore the development of the child’s cognitive and moral abilities and strengths.

6. in its expanded form, the game is a collective activity

7. By developing children in many ways, the game itself also changes and develops.

Exist different types games: active, didactic, games - dramatization, constructive.

In early childhood, elements of role-playing play arise and begin to form. In role-playing games, children satisfy their desire to live together with adults and, in a special, playful form, reproduce the relationships and work activities of adults.

A. N. Leontyev, D. B. Elkonin, A. V. Zaporozhets called role-playing the leading activity of a preschool child. Role-playing play arises and exists in connection with other types of children's practice: primarily with observations of the surrounding life, listening to stories and conversations with adults.

D. B. Elkonin, based on an analysis of ethnographic research, came to the conclusion that role-playing game arose during the historical development of society, as a result of a change in the child’s place in the system of social relations, that is, it is social in origin. The appearance of play is not associated with the action of some innate, instinctive forces, but with certain conditions of the child’s life in society. Childhood lengthened, and along with the emergence of role-playing games, a new stage in the mental development of the child arose - preschool age. D. B. Elkonin emphasized that the lengthening of childhood occurs not by building a new period over an existing one, but by a kind of wedging.

The game is social not only in origin, but also in its content. All researchers describing role play indicated that it is greatly influenced by the reality surrounding the child, and that the plots of children's games are determined by the social, everyday, and family conditions of the child's life.

The plot-role-playing game consists of children reproducing the actions of adults and the relationships between them. That is, in the game the child models adults and their relationships.

Role-playing play arises at the border between early and preschool ages and reaches its peak in the middle of preschool childhood.

D. B. Elkonin identified in the structure of a plot-role-playing game such components as plot - that sphere of reality that is reflected in the game;

Those moments in the activities and relationships of adults that the child reproduces constitute the content of the game;

The development of play action, the role and rules of the game occurs throughout preschool childhood along the following lines: from games with an expanded system of actions and hidden roles and rules behind them - to games with a collapsed system of actions, with clearly defined roles, but hidden rules - and, finally , to games with open rules and hidden roles behind them. D. B. Elkonin showed that the central component of a plot-based role-playing game is a role - a way of behavior of people in various situations that corresponds to accepted social norms and rules.

In addition to this type of game, the preschooler masters games with rules that contribute to the child’s intellectual development, improvement of basic movements and motor qualities.

Thus, the game changes and reaches a high level of development by the end of preschool age. There are two main phases or stages in the development of the game. The first stage (3 – 5 years) is characterized by the reproduction of the logic of people’s real actions; The content of the game is objective actions. At the second stage (5–7 years), real relationships between people are modeled, and the content of the game becomes social relationships, the social meaning of an adult’s activity.

2. The role of play in the mental development of a child

Play is the leading activity in preschool age; it has a significant impact on the development of the child.

In play activities, the mental qualities and personal characteristics of the child are most intensively formed. The game develops other types of activities, which then acquire independent meaning.

Many teachers and psychologists who studied the game emphasized the importance of the game for the mental development of the child. The outstanding Russian teacher K. D. Ushinsky attached great importance to the game. He wrote: “For a child, play is reality, and a reality much more interesting than the one that surrounds him. It is more interesting for a child because it is partly his own creation. The child lives in play, and the traces of this life remain deeper in him than the traces of real life, which he could not yet enter due to the complexity of its phenomena and interests. In real life, a child is nothing more than a child, a creature that does not yet have any independence, blindly and carelessly carried away by the flow of life; in the game, the child, already a maturing person, tries his strength and independently manages his own creations.” Play is the leading activity in preschool age; it has a significant impact on the development of the child. First of all, in the game children learn to fully communicate with each other. Research conducted by A.P. Usanova and her students revealed the following levels of formation of such relationships throughout preschool childhood: - the level of disorganized behavior that leads to the destruction of other children's games (the child takes away toys, breaks buildings, etc.). This behavior mainly occurs in younger preschoolers who do not yet know how to play; however, recently tendencies towards aggressive behavior and destruction have been observed in a large number of older children - even among older preschoolers there are children with behavior characterizing the first level; -- the level of solitary play is characterized by the fact that the child does not interact with other children, but does not interfere with their play. The fact that the baby is focused on his play and knows how to organize it is a prerequisite for the transition to joint games; -- the level of side-by-side games is manifested in the fact that two or three children can play at the same table, but each acts in accordance with his own game goal, realizing his own plan. The value of this level is that the child develops an understanding of how to relate to the play of another. At this level, conditions are created for the natural unification of children at play; -- the level of short-term communication and interaction is characterized by the fact that the child for some time subordinates his actions to a general plan and aligns them with the actions of others. The new stage of the game is characterized by the emergence of a plan and the desire of children to select appropriate objects and toys. But the idea is not yet stable; during the games, children can change it or forget about it. This behavior indicates a lack of ability to organize a game and plan it. But the most important thing is that preschoolers do not yet feel their connection and dependence on common activities; -- level of long-term communication and interaction based on interest in the content of the game. The child has the initial forms of a responsible attitude towards his role in general game. He begins to evaluate the quality and result of his personal actions and the actions of his peers in terms of tasks cooperative game. The duration of the game is related to the children's interest. At this stage, children are quite independent and can come up with ideas. interesting story , organize a game and play for a long time; -- level of constant interaction based on common interests and selective sympathies. Children united by friendly interests are able to yield to each other in choosing a plot, distributing roles, and coordinating their actions. The gaming situation and actions with it have a constant impact on the mental development of a preschool child. In the game, the child learns to act with a substitute object - he gives the substitute a new game name and acts with it in accordance with the name. The substitute object becomes a support for thinking. Based on actions with substitute objects, the child learns to think about a real object. Gradually, playful actions with objects are reduced and the child learns to think about objects and act with them mentally. Thus, the game contributes to a greater extent to the child’s gradual transition to thinking in terms of ideas. Role-playing play is crucial for the development of imagination. In the games of children of senior preschool age, substitute objects are no longer necessary, just as many play actions are optional. Children learn to identify objects and actions with them, and create new situations in their imagination. The game can take place internally. Productive activities of the child - drawing, design - at different stages of preschool childhood are closely merged with play. While drawing, the child often acts out the story. The animals he drew fight among themselves, catch up with each other, the wind tears down hanging apples, etc. Within the play activity, educational activity begins to take shape, which later becomes the leading activity. The learning elements are introduced by the adult; they do not arise directly from the game. A preschooler begins to learn by playing - he treats learning as a kind of role-playing game with certain rules. By following these rules, the child unnoticed masters basic learning activities. The preschooler develops a desire to learn and develops initial skills. Play as a leading activity is of particular importance for the development of reflective thinking. Reflection is a person’s ability to analyze his own actions, actions, motives and correlate them with universal human values, as well as with the actions, actions, motives of other people. In a role-playing game, prerequisites arise for reflection as a purely human ability to comprehend one’s own actions, anticipating the reactions of other people. Play, when properly organized, creates favorable conditions for the development and improvement of the movements of a preschool child. Complex motor skills are acquired by a child not through play, but through direct instruction, but it is play that creates favorable conditions for their further improvement. Play is the first form of activity available to preschoolers, which involves the conscious reproduction and improvement of new movements. In a developed role-playing game with its intricate plots and complex roles, creating a fairly wide scope for improvisation, children develop a creative imagination. The game promotes the development of voluntary memory. The mechanism for controlling one’s behavior—subordination to the rules—develops precisely in the game, and then appears in other types of activities. Arbitrariness presupposes the presence of a pattern of behavior that the child follows and control. In the game, the model is not moral standards or other requirements of adults, but the image of another person whose behavior the child copies. Self-control only appears towards the end of preschool age, so initially the child needs external control - from his playmates. Children control each other first, and then each of himself. External control gradually falls out of the process of behavior management, and the image begins to regulate the child’s behavior directly. Thus, the game contributes to the development of voluntary behavior in the child. The game has a significant impact on intellectual development. At the initial stages of the development of role-playing play, the child already has thoughts about the object based on the word, but he can act in a mental way only when relying on real objects. The development of playful actions with objects proceeds along the lines of their reduction and generalization. This forms the basis for the transition to mental actions (generalizing objects, comparing them, abstracting a concept from an object, imagination). The game prepares the child for the upcoming school education, which consists of the formation of specific forms mental actions. Role-playing play is important not only for the development of certain forms of mental activity of a preschool child, but also for the formation of his personality. The child’s fulfillment of the assumed role of adults is associated with his emotional motives. As the game progresses, many fleeting desires arise, mainly caused by the attractiveness of other objects that are not at the child's disposal, or the roles that other children perform. But the child must abandon these random desires in favor of the main incentive. “In the process of resolving this conflict, which takes place in almost every role-playing game, two important features of the child’s motivational sphere are formed: firstly, a subordination of motives is formed here, the subordination of situational motives to more general and higher ones; secondly, here the very motives of a higher type are formed, associated with the fulfillment of the duties undertaken.” (D. B. Elkonin). The game develops not only the motivational-need sphere of the child. In the process of carrying out certain tasks, playful in form, but reflecting a certain social content, children master social functions, social relations and socially developed norms of behavior. Thus, in the game the formation of the most important aspects of the personality of a preschool child as a member of society takes place. The game is called the “queen of childhood” (D. B. Elkonin).

PLAY AND MENTAL DEVELOPMENT

The final chapter of the book: Elkonin D.B. Psychology of the game. M.: Pedagogy, 1978.

Long before play became a subject of scientific research, it was widely used as one of the most important means of raising children. In the second chapter of this book, we put forward a hypothesis about the historical origin of the game, linking it with the change in the child’s position in society. The time when education became a special social function goes back centuries, and the use of games as a means of education goes back to the same depths of centuries. In different pedagogical systems, the game was given a different role, but there is not a single system in which the game is not given a place to one degree or another. This special place of play in various educational systems was apparently determined by the fact that play is somewhat consonant with the nature of the child. We know that it is consonant not with the biological, but with the social nature of the child, the need that arises extremely early in him to communicate with adults, which turns into a tendency to live a common life with adults.

With regard to younger ages, even to this day in most countries of the world, raising children before they enter school is a private matter for the family, and the content and methods of upbringing are passed on by tradition. Of course, a lot of work is being done in some countries to educate parents, but it mainly focuses on nutrition and hygiene issues. The problems of family education pedagogy in relation to preschool children have not yet been sufficiently developed. And it is difficult to turn all parents into teachers who consciously guide the development of children in these most critical periods of childhood.

As soon as issues of organized, purposeful, pedagogically appropriate public education of children of the youngest ages arise, their solution faces a number of difficulties of both an economic and political nature. In order for society to take care of the upbringing of preschool children, it must be primarily interested in the comprehensive education of all children without exception.

Under the dominance of family education, there are only two types of activities that influence the child’s development processes. These are, firstly, various forms of work in the family, and secondly, play in its most diverse forms. Labor is increasingly being squeezed out of the life of a modern family; only some forms of everyday self-service labor remain. Play, like everything that is not labor, in a completely undifferentiated form becomes the main form of a child’s life, the universal and only spontaneously arising form of raising children. Closed in the circle of family and family relationships, living within the confines of his nursery, the child naturally reflects in games mainly these relationships and the functions that individual family members perform in relation to him and to each other. Perhaps this is precisely where the impression is created of the existence of a special children's world and of play as an activity whose main content is all kinds of forms of compensation, behind which lies the child's tendency to break out of this vicious circle into the world of broad social relations.

The educational system of the kindergarten includes the development of a wide range of children's interests and forms of activities. These are elementary forms of household labor and self-service, and constructive activity with the inclusion of elementary labor skills, and various forms of productive activity - drawing, modeling, etc., and classes to familiarize the child with the phenomena of nature and society surrounding the child, and various forms of aesthetic activity - singing, rhythm, dancing, and elementary forms of educational activities to master reading, writing, basic mathematics, and, finally, role-playing play.

Some teachers still have a tendency to universalize the importance of play for mental development; a wide variety of functions, both purely educational and educational, are attributed to it; therefore, there is a need to more accurately determine the influence of play on the development of a child and find its place in the general system of educational work of institutions for children. preschool children. Of course, all those types of activities that exist in the organized system of public education are not separated from each other by a wall and there are close connections between them. Some of them probably overlap each other in their influence on mental development. Nevertheless, it is necessary to more accurately determine those aspects of the mental development and formation of the child’s personality that primarily develop in play and cannot develop or experience only limited influence in other types of activities.

Studying the significance of play for mental development and personality formation is very difficult. A pure experiment is impossible here simply because it is impossible to remove play activities from the lives of children and see how the development process will proceed. This cannot be done both for purely pedagogical reasons and in fact, since where, due to the imperfect organization of children’s lives in preschool institutions, they do not have time for independent role-playing, they play at home, compensating for the shortcomings in the organization of life in kindergarten. These individual, home games have limited value and cannot replace group play. At home, often the only playmate is a doll, and the range of relationships that can be recreated with a doll is relatively limited. It’s a completely different matter to role-play in a group of children with inexhaustible possibilities for recreating the most diverse relationships and connections that people enter into in real life.

For these reasons, the actual experimental study of the significance of role-playing games for development is difficult. Therefore, we have to use, on the one hand, a purely theoretical analysis and, on the other hand, a comparison of children’s behavior in play with their behavior in other types of activities.

Before moving on to presenting materials that make it possible to imagine the significance of play for mental development, let us point out one limitation that we set for ourselves from the very beginning. We will not consider the purely didactic value of the game, that is, the value of the game for acquiring new ideas or developing new skills. From our point of view, the purely didactic value of the game is very limited. It is possible, of course, and this is often done, to use the game for purely didactic purposes, but then, as our observations show, its specific features recede into the background.

You can, for example, organize a shopping game to teach children how to use scales. To do this, real scales and weights are introduced into the game, some bulk material is given, and children take turns, performing the functions of sellers and buyers, learning to measure and weigh certain objects. In such games, children, of course, can learn to weigh, measure, count, and even count money and give change. Observations show that at the same time, actions with scales and other measures, counting operations, etc. become the focus of children’s activities, but relationships between people in the process of “buying and selling” are relegated to the background. Here you can rarely find attentive attitude of sellers towards buyers and polite attitude of buyers towards sellers. But this is precisely the content of a role-playing game.

This does not mean at all that we deny the possibility of using the game in this way. Not at all, but we will not consider the significance of such use of the game. Role-playing is not an exercise at all. A child, acting out the activities of a driver, doctor, sailor, captain, salesman, does not acquire any skills. He does not learn to use a real syringe, or drive a real car, or cook real food, or weigh goods.

The importance of role-playing play for development has clearly not been sufficiently studied. The understanding of its role we offer should be considered only a preliminary sketch, and by no means a final solution.

1. Game and development of the motivational-need sphere

The most important thing, although until recently not sufficiently appreciated, is the importance of play for the development of the child’s motivational-need sphere. L. S. Vygotsky was undoubtedly right when he brought to the fore the problem of motives and needs as central to understanding the very emergence of role-playing games. Pointing out the contradiction between emerging new desires and the tendency towards their immediate implementation, which cannot be realized, he only posed the problem, but did not solve it. This is natural, since at that time there were no factual materials that would provide the possibility of a solution. And even now this issue can only be resolved tentatively.

A. N. Leontiev (1965 b), in one of the earliest publications devoted to the further development of the theory of play put forward by L. S. Vygotsky, proposed a hypothetical solution to this issue. According to A. N. Leontyev, the essence of the matter is that “the objective world, conscious of the child, is increasingly expanding for him. This world no longer includes only objects that make up the child’s immediate environment, objects with which the child himself can and does act, but also objects of action by adults with which the child is not yet able to actually act, which are not yet physically accessible to him. .

Thus, the basis of the transformation of play during the transition from the period of pre-preschool to preschool childhood is the expansion of the range of human objects, the mastery of which now faces him as a task and the world of which he becomes aware of in the course of his further mental development” (1965b, p. 470).

“For a child at this stage of his mental development,” continues A. N. Leontyev, “abstract theoretical activity, abstract contemplative knowledge does not yet exist, and therefore awareness appears in him primarily in the form of action. A child who masters the world around him is a child striving to act in this world.

Therefore, in the course of developing his awareness of the objective world, the child strives to enter into an effective relationship not only with the things immediately accessible to him, but also with the wider world, that is, he strives to act like an adult” (ibid., p. 471). The last statement expresses the essence of the issue. However, it seems to us that the mechanism of the emergence of these new desires was described by A. N. Leontyev not entirely accurately. He sees the contradiction that leads to role-playing in the collision of the child’s classic “I myself” with the no less classic “no” of an adult. It is not enough for a child to contemplate a moving car, it is not enough even to sit in this car, he needs to act, control, command the car.

“In the child’s activity, that is, in its actual internal form, this contradiction appears as a contradiction between the rapid development in the child of the need to act with objects, on the one hand, and the development of the operations that carry out these actions (i.e., methods of action) - with another. The child wants to drive a car himself, he wants to row a boat, but he cannot carry out this action, and cannot carry it out primarily because he does not and cannot master those operations that are required by the real objective conditions of this action" ( ibid., p. 472).

In light of the facts set out in the studies of F.I. Fradkina and L.S. Slavina, to which we have already referred, the process proceeds somewhat differently. The very expansion of the range of objects with which the child wants to act independently is secondary. It is based, metaphorically speaking, on the child’s “discovery” of a new world, the world of adults with their activities, their functions, their relationships. This world was obscured for the child by objective actions, which he mastered under the guidance and help of an adult, but without the adults noticing.

In early childhood, a child is completely absorbed in an object and how to act with it, its functional meaning. But now he has mastered some, albeit very elementary, actions and can perform them independently. At this moment, the child is separated from the adult and the child notices that he is acting like an adult. The child actually acted like an adult before, but did not notice it. He looked at the object through an adult, as if through glass. In this, as we have seen, the adults themselves help him, pointing out to the child that he acts “like someone.” Affect is transferred from the object to the person who previously stood behind the object. Thanks to this, the adult and his actions begin to act as a model for the child.

Objectively, this means that the adult appears to the child primarily from the perspective of his functions. The child wants to act like an adult; he is completely at the mercy of this desire. It is under the influence of this very general desire, first with the help of an adult (educator, parents), that he begins to act as if he were an adult. This affect is so strong that a small hint is enough - and the child happily turns, of course, purely emotionally, into an adult. It is the intensity of this affect that explains the ease with which children take on the roles of adults. The experiments of L. S. Slavina showed this with sufficient convincing. These prompts from adults seem to indicate a way out for intense affect. Therefore, they should not be afraid, they go in the direction of the dominant affect that owns the child - to act independently and act like adults. (Note that in cases where this desire does not find such a way out, it can take on completely different forms - whims, conflicts, etc.)

The main paradox in the transition from an object-based game to a role-playing game is that directly in the object-based | environment of children at the time of this transition, significant change may not occur. The child had and still has all the same toys - dolls, cars, cubes, bowls, etc. Moreover, in the actions themselves in the first stages of the development of role-playing play, nothing changes significantly. The child washed the doll, fed it, and put it to bed. Now he does the same actions from the outside and with the same doll. What happened? All these objects and actions with them are now included in the child’s new system of relationships to reality, in new affective-attractive activity. Thanks to this, they objectively acquired a new meaning. The transformation of a child into a mother, and a doll into a child, leads to the transformation of bathing, feeding, and cooking into child care. These actions now express the mother’s attitude towards the child - her love and affection, and perhaps vice versa; it depends on the specific living conditions of the child, the specific relationships that surround him.

A child on the border of the transition from object-based to role-playing play does not yet know either the social relations of adults, or the social functions of adults, or the social meaning of their activities. He acts in the direction of his desire, objectively puts himself in the position of an adult, while an emotional and effective orientation occurs in the relationships of adults and the meaning of their activities. Here the intellect follows the emotionally effective experience.

The generalization and reduction of play actions is a symptom of the fact that such a highlighting of human relationships occurs and that this highlighted meaning is emotionally experienced. Thanks to this, there first occurs a purely emotional understanding of the functions of an adult as carrying out activities that are significant for other people and, therefore, evoking a certain attitude on their part.

Added to this is another feature of the role-playing game that has not been sufficiently appreciated. After all, a child, no matter how emotionally he enters into the role of an adult, still feels like a child. He looks at himself through the role he has taken on, that is, through an adult, emotionally compares himself with an adult and discovers that he is not yet an adult. The awareness that he is still a child occurs through play, and from here a new motive arises - to become an adult and actually carry out his functions.

L. I. Bozhovich (1951) showed that by the end of preschool age, new motives arise in the child. These motives take on the concrete form of the desire to go to school and begin to carry out serious socially significant and socially valued activities. For a child, this is the path to adulthood.

Play acts as an activity that is closely related to the child’s needs. In it, the primary emotional-effective orientation in the meaning of human activity occurs, the consciousness of one’s limited place in the system of relationships among adults and the need to be an adult arise. Those trends that a number of authors pointed out as underlying the emergence of play are in fact the result of development in preschool age, and role-playing play is of particular importance.

The significance of the game is not limited to the fact that the child develops new motives for activity and tasks associated with them. It is essential that a new psychological form of motives arises in the game. Hypothetically, one can imagine that it is in the game that a transition occurs from motives that have the form of pre-conscious, affectively colored immediate desires, to motives that have the form of generalized intentions that stand on the verge of consciousness.

Of course, other types of activities influence the formation of these new needs, but in no other activity is there such an emotionally filled entry into the lives of adults, such an effective highlighting of social functions and the meaning of human activity, as in the game. This is the first and main significance of role-playing play for the development of a child.

2. Play and overcoming “cognitive egocentrism”

J. Piaget, who devoted a large number of experimental studies to the study of child thinking, characterizes the main quality of thinking of preschool children, on which all others depend, as “cognitive egocentrism.” By this feature, Piaget understands the insufficient delimitation of his point of view from other possible ones, and hence its actual dominance. Quite a lot of different studies have been devoted to the problem of “cognitive egocentrism”, the possibility of overcoming it and the transition of thinking to a higher level of development.

The process of transition from the level of thinking characteristic of the preschool period of development to higher forms is very complex. It seems to us that the identification of an adult as a model of action, arising on the border of early and; preschool periods of development already contains the possibilities of such a transition. Role-playing leads to a change in the child's position - from its individual and specifically childish position - to a new position as an adult. The child’s very acceptance of the role and the associated change in the meanings of things involved in the game represents a continuous change from one position to another.

We assumed that play is an activity in which the main processes associated with overcoming “cognitive egocentrism” occur. An experimental test of this assumption was carried out by V. A. Nedospasova (1972) in a special study that was in the nature of an experimental formation of “decentration” in children.

In one of his early works, J. Piaget (1932) drew attention to the vivid manifestation of egocentrism when children solved the Wiene problem about three brothers. The essence of this decision is that, while correctly indicating how many brothers he has, the child cannot correctly indicate how many brothers any of his brothers have, i.e., take the point of view of one of his brothers. So, if there are two brothers in a family, then to the question: “How many brothers do you have?” - the child answers correctly: “I have one brother, Kolya.” To the question: “How many brothers does Kolya have?” he replies: “Kolya has no brothers.”

Subsequently, this main symptom of egocentrism, i.e., the dominance of one’s immediate position in the child’s thinking and the inability to take a different position and recognize the existence of other points of view, was obtained by J. Piaget and his colleagues when solving a wide variety of problems, the content of which was spatial relations and relationships between individual aspects of various phenomena.

In preliminary experiments conducted by V. A. Nedospasova, in which the problem of three brothers was proposed not in relation to one’s own family, but in relation to someone else’s or one’s own conditional family, the egocentric position either did not manifest itself at all, or manifested itself to a much lesser extent. This served as the basis for the assumption that if you form a child’s attitude towards his family as a “stranger”, that is, form a new position in the child, then all the symptoms of “cognitive egocentrism” can be removed.

The experiment was carried out according to the classical scheme of experimental genetic formation. Children (5, 6, 7 years old) were selected in whom, when solving the problem of three brothers and a series of other problems proposed by J. Piaget’s colleagues, as well as specially designed by Nedospasova, “cognitive egocentrism” was clearly revealed. In these children, a new position was formed, which we called conditionally dynamic.

Previously, the children were introduced to relationships within the family. To do this, three dolls representing brothers and two dolls representing parents were placed in front of the child. During the conversation with the child, relationships were established: parents, son, brother. After the children had relatively easily navigated the family relationships within this doll family, the parents left, only the brothers or sisters remained, and the process of formation began, which passed through two phases. In the first phase of the experiment, the child, with the help of the experimenter, identified himself with one of the brothers (sisters), called himself by the name of the doll, assumed its role, the role of one of the brothers, and reasoned from this new position.

For example, if a child in this situation became Kolya, then he had to determine who his brothers were by pointing to other dolls and calling their names, and then say his name, i.e., establish his position. The child consistently identified himself with all the dolls and determined who in each of these situations became his brothers, and then who he became if his brothers were these dolls.

The entire experiment was carried out on dolls, the child saw the whole situation in front of him and at the same time expressed his opinion about each situation. Then the experiment was carried out on the brothers' graphic symbols. Brothers were designated by colored circles, and the children, taking the role of one or another brother, circled the brothers with their color, while simultaneously calling out their names. So the child moved, in a purely conditional sense, sequentially to the positions of all his brothers. Finally, the same actions were carried out on a purely verbal level. The transition from actions on dolls to actions on graphic symbols and, finally, on a purely verbal level occurred only after the child performed actions in a given way quite freely.

Control measurements carried out after this formation phase showed that the final overcoming of “cognitive egocentrism” does not occur. Only some children achieved higher levels of solving control problems. Analysis of the results of this control experiment revealed a phenomenon that we called “sequential centralization.” Conditionally accepting each time a new position, a new role with which the child views the situation, he still continues to isolate, although each time new, but only obvious to him, relationships. However, these positions exist as unrelated, non-intersecting and uncoordinated with each other. Children. are bound by the position they take in each individual case, without presupposing the simultaneous presence of the points of view of other persons and other aspects of the object or situation under consideration. Children do not notice that, having taken a different position, they themselves have become different in the eyes of other participants (in our experiment - other dolls), i.e. they are perceived differently. Being Kolya, the child sees that he has become a brother to Andrei and Vitya, but does not yet see that as Andrei he has become the brother of others, that is, not only has he acquired new brothers, but he himself has become the brother of others persons

Having established the presence of “sequential centralization” in children, V. A. Nedospasova moved on to the second phase of the experiment. The situation was restored. Three dolls were again placed in front of the child. The child identified himself with one of them, but now he had to call not his brothers, but the brothers of someone from those with whom he did not identify himself. For example, on the table in front of the child there are three dolls - Sasha, Kostya and Vanya. They say to the child: “You are Vanya, but don’t tell me who your brothers are. I know that. Tell me, who are Sasha's brothers? At Kostya's? Whose brothers are you and Sasha? What about you and Kostya? Formation was carried out with dolls, then graphically, and finally purely verbally. Formation ended when the child, without any support, that is, on a purely verbal level, carried out all the reasoning, taking a conditional position, but reasoning from the point of view of another person. Let's give an example: the experiment with Valya (5; 3). Exp: Let us have three sisters in our problem. Which for example? Let's call one Zina, the other Nadya, the third Anya. If you are Zina, then what kind of sisters will Anya have? Valya: Then me and Nadya will be at Anya’s. Exp.: Then what kind of sisters will Nadya have? Valya: When I’m Zina, Nadya has me and Anya. Exp.: What if you are Nadya?

Valya: Then Anya has me, Nadya and Zina. Zina has me and Anya. After completion of formation on a purely verbal level, all children were offered control tasks, which included the problem of three brothers; the Three Mountains task and the Beads task (both used by Piaget's collaborators); a task to determine the right and left sides and several tasks invented by V. A. Nedospasova, in which the phenomenon of “centring” appeared very clearly. In all age groups, all these problems were solved in 80-100% of cases without any help from the experimenter, and with a little help - by all children. In this way, under the conditions of this pre-experimental game, it was possible to overcome the phenomenon of “cognitive egocentrism.”

Of course, in reality everything is much more complicated. Experimental genetic research is only a model of actual processes. What grounds are there for thinking that the experiment carried out is a model of the processes occurring specifically in role-playing play, and that it is role-playing play that is the activity in which the “decentration” mechanism is formed?

First of all, we point out that this experiment is not a model of any role-playing game, but only one in which there is at least one partner, i.e., a collective game. In such a game, a child who has taken on a certain role, acting from this new position, is forced to take into account the role of his partner.

The child now addresses his friend not as in ordinary life, for example, as Kolya addresses Vanya, but in accordance with that new position, which is determined by the role he has taken on. It may even be that in real life there is a relationship of antagonism between the two children, but as play partners it is replaced by a relationship of caring and cooperation. Each of the partners now acts towards each other from a new conditional position. He must coordinate his actions with the role of his partner, although he himself is not in this role.

In addition, all objects that are involved in the game and to which certain meanings are given from the point of view of one role should be perceived by all participants in the game precisely in these meanings, although they are not actually acted upon. For example, in the repeatedly described game of doctor there are always two partners - the doctor and the patient. The doctor must coordinate his actions with the role of the patient, and vice versa. This also applies to objects. Let's imagine that the doctor is holding a stick representing a syringe. She is a syringe for the doctor because he acts on her in a certain way. But for the patient, a stick is a stick. She can become a syringe for him only if he takes the doctor’s point of view, without at the same time taking on his role. Thus, the game acts as a real practice not | only a change of position when taking on a role, but also as a practice of relationships with a game partner from the point of view of the role played by the partner, not only as a real one; the practice of acting with objects in accordance with the meanings given to them, but also as the practice of coordinating points of view on the meanings of these objects without directly manipulating them. This is the process of “decentration” that occurs every minute. The game acts as a cooperative activity of children. J. Piaget has long pointed out the importance of cooperation for the formation of operator structures. However, he, firstly, did not note that cooperation between a child and adults begins very early, and, secondly, he believed that real cooperation occurs only at the end of preschool age with the emergence of games with rules, which, according to J. Piaget, require a general recognition of the permissible conditions. In fact, this kind of cooperation arises along with the emergence of role-playing games and is its necessary condition.

We have already indicated that J. Piaget was interested in play only in connection with the emergence of a symbolic function. He was interested in the individual symbol, through which the child adapts, according to Piaget, a world alien to him to his individual egocentric thought. Indeed, in individual play, in which the child, at best, has a doll as a partner, there is no strict need either to change position or to coordinate his point of view with the points of view of other participants in the game. Maybe, . that in this case the game not only does not fulfill the function of “moral and cognitive decentering”, but, on the contrary, it fixes even more the child’s personal, unique point of view on. C objects and relationships, fixes the egocentric position. Such a game can really take a child away from real world into the closed world of his individual desires, limited by the framework of narrow family relationships.

In an experimental study by V. A. Nedospasova, play appeared to us as an activity in which both cognitive and emotional “decentration” of the child occurs. In this we see the most important importance of play for intellectual development. The point is not only that individual intellectual operations are developed or re-formed in play, but that the child’s position in relation to the world around him radically changes and the very mechanism of a possible change of position and coordination of his point of view with other possible points of view is formed. It is this change that opens up the opportunity and path for the transition of thinking to a new level and the formation of new intellectual operations.

3. Play and development of mental actions

In Soviet psychology, research into the formation of mental actions and concepts has become widespread. We owe the development of this most important problem primarily to the research of P. Ya. Galperin and his collaborators. P. Ya. Galperin (1959), as a result of numerous experimental studies that were in the nature of the experimental-genetic formation of mental actions and concepts, established the main stages through which the formation of any new mental action and the concept associated with it should pass. If we exclude the stage of preliminary orientation in a task, then the formation of mental actions and concepts with predetermined properties naturally goes through the following stages: the stage of formation of action on material objects or their material substitute models; the stage of formation of the same action in terms of loud speech; finally, the stage of formation of the mental action itself (in some cases, intermediate stages are also observed, for example, the formation of an action in terms of expanded speech, but to oneself, etc.). These stages can be called stages of the functional development of mental actions.

One of the unsolved to date, but at the same time the most important problems is the problem of the relationship between functional and ontogenetic, age-related development. It is impossible to imagine the process of ontogenetic development without functional development, if we accept, of course, the main thesis for us that the mental development of a child cannot occur otherwise than in the form of assimilation of the generalized experience of previous generations, fixed in ways of acting with objects, in cultural objects, in science , although development is not limited to assimilation.

It is possible, however purely hypothetically, to imagine the functional development of any new mental action as a compressed repetition of the stages of ontogenetic development of thinking and, at the same time, as the formation of a zone of proximal development. If we accept the stages of development of thinking established in Soviet psychology (practical-effective, visual-figurative, verbal-logical) and compare with the stages established during functional formation, then this assumption has some basis. Considering the child’s actions in play, it is easy to notice that the child is already acting with the meanings of objects, but at the same time relies on their material substitutes - toys. An analysis of the development of actions in the game shows that the reliance on substitute objects and actions with them is increasingly reduced. If at the initial stages of development a substitute object and a relatively detailed action with it are required (the stage of materialized action, according to P. Ya. Galperin), then at later stages of the development of the game the object acts | through the word-name as a sign of the thing, and the action - as abbreviated and generalized gestures accompanied by speech. Thus, play actions are of an intermediate nature, gradually acquiring the character of mental actions with the meanings of objects, performed in terms of loud speech and still slightly relying on external action, but which has already acquired the character of a generalized gesture-indication. It is interesting to note that the words spoken by the child during the game are already of a generalized nature. For example, when preparing for lunch, a child comes up to the wall, makes one or two movements with his hands - washes them - and says: “We washed them,” and then, after making a series of eating movements in the same way, bringing the chopstick-spoon to his mouth, declares: “Here.” and had lunch." This path of development towards actions in the mind with meanings separated from objects is at the same time the emergence of prerequisites for the formation of imagination.

In the light of the above considerations, the game acts as an activity in which the formation of prerequisites for the transition of mental actions to a new, higher stage occurs - mental actions based on speech. The functional development of play actions flows into ontogenetic development, creating a zone of proximal development of mental actions. Perhaps this model of the relationship between functional and ontogenetic development, which we observe so clearly in the game, is a general model of the relationship between functional and ontogenetic development. This is the subject of special research.

In connection with the discussion of the role of play in the intellectual development of a child, the views of J. Bruner are of great interest. In the article we have already mentioned (J. Bruner, 1972), he very highly appreciates the importance of manipulative games of great apes for the development of the intellectual activity of these animals and even believes that such games contain the prerequisites for their subsequent use of tools. We have already expressed our point of view on such manipulative games when analyzing Buytendijk’s views.

In one of his subsequent works, J. Bruner (1975) experimentally shows the role of preliminary manipulations with material (elements of tools) for the subsequent solution of intellectual problems. Preschool children were offered a common practical intelligence task of the Köhler type. One group of children, before solving the problem, watched an adult connect sticks with a staple; another practiced independently attaching a staple to one of the sticks; the third watched adults solve the entire problem; the fourth was given the opportunity to play with materials outside of solving the problem (freely manipulate the material); the fifth group did not see the material at all before presenting the problem for solution. It turned out that the play group (fourth) completed the task just as well as the one in which the children observed the entire process of solving the problem by an adult, and much better than the children in the other groups.

Based on these very interesting experiments, J. Bruner highly appreciates the importance of play for intellectual development, since during play such combinations of material and such orientation in its properties can arise that can lead to the subsequent use of this material as tools in solving problems.

It seems to us that in these experiments we are not talking about a game, but rather about free, non- related decision any specific task of experimenting with a material, a kind of free constructive activity in which orientation in the properties of the material occurs more fully, since it is not associated with the use of this material to solve any specific problem. Bruner's experiments did not involve play, but a special activity that ethologists call research.

In the game, as we see it, more general mechanisms of intellectual activity develop.

4. Play and development of voluntary behavior

During the study of the game, it was found that every role-playing game contains a hidden rule and that the development of role-playing games are on from games with a detailed game situation and hidden rules to games with an open rule and roles hidden behind it. We will not repeat all the facts obtained in the relevant studies and already presented by us. The position of L. S. Vygotsky was fully justified that in the game “the child cries like a patient and rejoices like a player” and that in the game every minute the child refuses fleeting desires in favor of fulfilling the role he has taken on.

All the above facts convincingly indicate that during play a significant restructuring of the child’s behavior occurs - it becomes arbitrary. By voluntary behavior we will understand behavior carried out in accordance with a model (regardless of whether it is given in the form of the actions of another person or in the form of an already identified rule) and controlled by comparison with this model as a standard.

A.V. Zaporozhets was the first to draw attention to the fact that the nature of the movements performed by a child in a game and in a direct task is significantly different. A.V. Zaporozhets established that the structure and organization of movements changes during development. They clearly distinguish between the preparation phase and the execution phase. “Higher forms of the structure of movements first appear in the early genetic stages only when solving problems that, due to their external design, due to the clarity and obviousness of the demands that they make on the child, organize his behavior in a certain way. However, in the process of further development, these higher forms of movement organization, which previously each time needed favorable conditions, subsequently acquire a certain stability, become, as it were, a common manner of motor behavior of the child and manifest themselves in the conditions of a wide variety of tasks, even in cases where there is no there are external circumstances favorable to them” (1948, p. 139).

A. V. Zaporozhets cites the important results of the research of T. O. Ginevskaya, who specifically studied the significance of the game for the organization of movements. It turned out that both the effectiveness of the movement and its organization significantly depend on the structural place the movement occupies in the implementation of the role played by the child. Thus, in the dramatized game of an athlete, not only did the relative efficiency of the jump increase, but the very nature of the movement changed - in it the preparatory phase, or the phase of a kind of start, stood out much more prominently. “The qualitative difference in motor behavior in the two compared series of experiments,” writes A.V. Zaporozhets, “consisted, in particular, in the fact that in a situation of dramatized play, most children moved to a more complex organization of movement with a clearly defined preparatory and executive phase, i.e. .e. gave better results than in the game “Hares-Hunters”” (ibid., p. 161).

Concluding his study, A.V. Zaporozhets writes: “Game is the first form of activity available to a preschooler, which involves the conscious reproduction and improvement of new movements.

In this regard, the motor development accomplished by a preschooler in play is a real prologue to conscious development! physical exercises for schoolchildren” (ibid., p. 166).

3. V. Manuylenko (1948) conducted a special experimental study of the development of voluntary behavior. The object of the study was the ability of a preschool child to voluntarily maintain a still posture. The criterion was the time during which the children could maintain this position. Of all the experimental series conducted, it is of interest to us to compare the results of two series - when performing the role of a sentry in a collective game and during the direct task of standing motionless in the presence of the entire group. The results obtained very eloquently showed that in all age groups the duration of maintaining a motionless posture in a situation of playing a role exceeds the indicators of maintaining the same posture in conditions of a direct task. This advantage is especially great in children 4-6 years old, and it falls somewhat towards the end of preschool age.

What's the matter? What is the psychological mechanism of this peculiar “magic” of the role? Undoubtedly, motivation is of great importance. The fulfillment of a role, being emotionally attractive, has a stimulating effect on the performance of actions in which the role is embodied. Indication of motives is, however, insufficient. It is necessary to find the psychological mechanism through which motives can have this effect. The answer to this question helps to find a series of experiments additionally conducted by Z. V. Manuylenko. These series consisted in the fact that when playing the role of a sentry, in some cases there was a playing group, and in others, the fulfillment of this role was taken outside the playroom and the child fulfilled his role in a situation of loneliness. It turned out that in the presence of a group, the immobility pose was performed longer and more strictly than in a situation of loneliness. When performing a role in the presence of a group, children sometimes indicated to the child performing the role the need for certain behavior. The presence of children seemed to increase control over one’s behavior on the part of the performer himself.

There is reason to believe that when performing a role, the pattern of behavior contained in the role simultaneously becomes a standard with which the child himself compares his behavior and controls it. In play, a child performs two functions simultaneously; on the one hand, he fulfills his role, and on the other, he controls his behavior. Voluntary behavior is characterized not only by the presence of a pattern, but also by the presence of control over the implementation of this pattern. Role behavior in the game, as it turns out from the analysis, is complexly organized. It contains a sample that acts, on the one hand, as orienting behavior and, on the other hand, as a standard for control; it involves the execution of actions determined by the pattern; it contains a comparison with a sample, i.e. control. Thus, when performing a role, there is a kind of bifurcation, i.e. reflection. Of course, this is not yet conscious control. The entire game is dominated by an attractive thought and colored by an affective attitude, but it already contains all the basic components of voluntary behavior. The control function is still very weak and often still requires support from the situation, from the participants in the game. This is the weakness of this emerging function, but the significance of the game is that this function is born here. That is why the game can be considered a school of voluntary behavior,

Since the content of the roles, as we have already established, is mainly focused around the norms of relations between people, i.e. its main content is the norms of behavior that exist among adults, then in the game the child, as it were, moves into the developed world of higher forms of human activity , in the developed world the rules of human relationships. The norms underlying human relationships become, through play, a source of development of the child’s own morality. In this regard, the importance of the game can hardly be overestimated. The game is a school of morality, but not morality in performance, but morality in action.

The game is important for the formation of a friendly children's team, and for the formation of independence, and for the formation of a positive attitude towards work, and for correcting some deviations in the behavior of individual children, and for much more. All these educational effects are based on the influence that play has on the mental development of the child, on the formation of his personality.

Those aspects of mental development that we have identified and in relation to which the determining influence of the game have been shown are the most significant, since their development prepares the transition to a new, higher stage of mental development, the transition to a new period of development.