3.16. SPECIFICITY OF TEACHING CHILDREN OF PRESCHOOL AGE

In modern preschool pedagogy, education is characterized as a type of human cognitive activity. Teaching children of preschool age is a systematic, targeted, systematic process that ensures the transfer to them in an accessible form of the knowledge and skills provided by the program for the upbringing and education of children in pre-school educational institutions, as well as the development of cognitive abilities, curiosity and cognitive activity. Education is a specially organized adult cognitive activity of children, which defines its goals, objectives, content, forms and methods, selects teaching aids, didactic material.

Specially organized education is necessary for a preschooler child to streamline impressions that a child receives from the outside world spontaneously and haphazardly. In the process of purposeful learning, the intellectual development of children takes place. It is considered as an integral form of pedagogical activity aimed at the development of children. Specially organized learning accelerates the pace of the child’s individual development, contributes to the development of curiosity and observation, inquisitiveness and ingenuity; in the conditions of specially organized training, the all-round development of the child’s personality is going on, and educational tasks are being successfully accomplished.

In order for the development task to be solved successfully in the process of teaching children of preschool age, it must be an integral system that includes three main components: tasks and content adequate for them (education), appropriate forms of organization of the learning process, and its results.

Education, being an integral part of the pedagogical process aimed at the comprehensive development of the personality of a preschooler child, takes place in specially created conditions, in certain forms of its organization using special methods and techniques. Education in kindergarten is different from school: knowledge is given in an accessible form; training takes place in a variety of forms (classes, excursions, didactic games, staging); the assimilation of educational material takes place through active actions and practical manipulations with objects, in various activities (games, drawing, designing in an entertaining and interesting form); education of preschool children is oral, i.e. prebook. Learning is important in   preparing children for school (children form the basis for learning activities); leadership role in training belongs to the teacher.

By organizing specially organized training, the teacher is guided in his work by didactic principles: systematic and consistent, access to knowledge transfer, visibility, activity, individual approach, emotionality.

Education of preschool children is focused primarily on the acquisition of knowledge and skills, often acting as an end in itself. Based on this, the entire educational process in pre-school is often aimed at the formation of a certain range of knowledge necessary for a child at school, and not at the development of cognitive processes.

One of the problems of preschool children learning is the penetration of school uniforms and work methods into kindergarten: subject classes on a schedule, the static posture of an “exemplary” student; poll at the blackboard; undivided teaching initiative. The subject of cognitive activity is often the teacher, but not the child. Educational activities are imposed on adults, very often organized in a form that is not interesting for the child. Classes with direct education - a substitute that suppresses the initiative and activity of the child, which has no meaning, interest or developmental value for the child. Strict regulation of the place, order and course of classes create psychological difficulties for the implementation of program tasks.

Another problem for preschoolers is a large number of classes and the introduction of additional educational services, which often create the organization of children, turning kindergarten into the status of a tutoring link between preschool and school education. An excessive number of classes negatively affects the health of preschoolers.

New approaches to teaching preschoolers are based on the following principles:

- the principle of variability of models of cognitive activity, which provides for the variability of the content, forms and methods of organizing educational and cognitive activity of children;  

- the principle of development of self-valuable forms of activity, in accordance with which the child has the opportunity to explore the world through the activities most attractive to him (drawing, designing, reading together with an adult, role-playing, etc.). The task of an adult is to organize the development environment for this activity;

- the principle of a common psychological space, which takes into account that each person has his own psychological space. It includes the range of his preferences, aspirations, desires, interests, self-valued activities. In the organization of educational and cognitive activity, it is of fundamental importance that the psychological spaces of the child and the teacher coincide, so that the child does not solve the tasks of an adult (“You should know and be able to do this”), so that these tasks are common and are carried out by the child and teacher together;

- The principle of game knowledge, which was previously interpreted as the principle of game learning. This is not a game in class, but the whole occupation in the game, the game of thought in various activities.