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The relevance of the topic of the article. For the wide educational practice of kindergartens, the question of the psychological mechanisms of creative thinking is fundamental, since their formation begins precisely at the age of three to five years. If during this period of a person’s life the educational process is structured in such a way that the child’s creative thinking is not supported or even suppressed, then it will be very difficult, and sometimes impossible, to compensate for gaps in cognitive development at later life stages. It should be emphasized that, as a rule, teachers do not support creative thinking or even act to the detriment of it precisely because of a lack of understanding of the key principles of its development, which, in particular, are related to ensuring a balance of activities that actualize formal-logical, dialectical and symbolic structures of thinking.

The aim of the study. The work is aimed at identifying the features of the structure of cognitive abilities that make up the complex mechanism of creative thinking, which is one of the basic problems of psychology of cognitive development today. The question is posed of how dialectical thinking, formal logic and the ability to symbolize are related in preschool age. The assumption is verified that the use of Piaget’s tools, focused on fixing reversibility relations and the formation of the phenomenon of preservation, will reveal new aspects of the relationship between formal-logical and dialectical thought structures.

Description of the research progress. 272 preschoolers from Moscow and other regions of the Russian Federation were individually diagnosed. For data processing, methods of correlation analysis and verification of the independence of parameters according to the Pearson’s chi-squared criterion were applied.

Research results. The results of the study showed that the connection between the three lines of cognitive development of preschoolers is traced more consistently in relation to formal and dialectical thinking. With regard to symbolization, the connections are less consistent. The article concludes that normative, transformative and symbolic abilities are relatively independent lines in the cognitive development of preschoolers.

Conclusion. The data obtained indicate the complexity and heterogeneity of the mechanism of creative thinking and the heterogeneous structure of relationships between formal-logical and dialectical structures, as well as the ability to symbolize. Therefore, the program for the development of creative thinking for preschoolers should have a balanced character: by influencing one type of structures, we cannot expect that the rest will also develop as a result of this influence. To actualize the complex mechanism of a child’s creative thinking in the pedagogical terms, it is necessary to design problem situations together with the children, the resolution of which requires both the use of formal and dialectical logic and the ability to invent symbols, images, metaphors.

Relevance (context) of the subject of the article. The problem of creative abilities is becoming increasingly important in two contexts at once – both in the context of human self-realization, and in the context of the development of practices and production. A special place is occupied by the development of creative abilities in preschool age: even in the works of Lev Vygotsky, it was said about the importance of considering the germs of creativity in the game and fantasy of children. Today, within the framework of the cultural-historical approach, there are a number of scientific schools that study the possibilities of diagnosing and developing children’s creativity.

The aim of the study is to analyze the approaches to the study of children’s creativity in cultural-historical psychology in order to understand what answers to the questions posed by Lev Vygotsky, were discovered over the past decades, and what remained unanswered. It is also important to see how the questions themselves were transformed, since the raising of a new question is a sign of the development of science. The correlation of existing approaches is important for the development of new research programs in the logic of cultural-historical psychology.

Description of the research. The article analyzes various approaches to the research and development of creative abilities: V.V. Davydov and V.T. Kudryavtsev, D.B. Bogoyavlenskaya, N.E. Veraksa and O.M. Dyachenko, V.N. Druzhinin, L.F. Obukhova. The general and specific characteristics of the interpretation of children’s creativity in different approaches of the cultural and historical tradition are highlighted. The conducted research correlates with the questions about the creative nature of the human psyche and about children’s creativity, posed by L.S.Vygotsky.

Research results. The article concludes that despite all the differences in the approaches that have appeared in the logic of the cultural-historical tradition, they are united by the idea of the resourcefulness of preschool childhood and the importance of educational efforts aimed at maintaining the “sprouts of creativity”. In Russian studies, the question is raised about the means of creative abilities that allow us transforming the present situation (dialectical structures and symbols), as well as about the affective-volitional component of the creative process – the ability to detect a task. All this distinguishes the concepts that were born within the framework of the cultural-historical approach from the theory of creativity by J. Guilford and E. Torrance. At the same time, it is indicated that children’s activities (playing, storytelling, experimentation, etc.) are still rarely considered in research as a context for the manifestation of creative abilities.

Conclusion. The article concludes that it is important to conduct new research, both ascertaining and longitudinal, which will allow us to take the next steps in understanding how the means of developing creative abilities are mastered in children’s activities and how this affects the formation of creative abilities in subsequent ages.

The article is devoted to the practice of using problem situations for educational purposes when working with preschoolers. Currently, problem situations are more often used in the education of schoolchildren or adults, although studies demonstrate that preschoolers have the necessary prerequisites for the perception of ambiguous problems that do not have a direct answer, and their subsequent solution. The article analyzes studies that demonstrates the ability of preschool children to understand scientific problems, formulate hypotheses, and operate with the opposites. The ability of preschool children to solve problems without a direct answer and with ambiguous conditions in other ways than an adult solves them is considered not as a lower level of thinking than an adult, but as a specific form of thinking that works according to its own laws, but allows you to effectively achieve a new, creative result. Research shows that problem situations is an effective tool for the development of children’s thinking, in particular, studies of the Russian scientific school of dialectical psychology (structural-dialectical approach) present an idea about the value of judgments and reflections of a preschool child for his/her development, as well as for an adult who is in interaction with him.

This article examines the relationship between different aspects of cognitive development: formal-logical thinking, dialectical thinking, imagination, and cyclic representations. The findings of their research allow the authors to claim that there are two pairs of relationships which can conditionally be called the “standard cluster” (cyclic representations and formal-logical thinking) and the “cluster of transformation” (the action of mediation and image activation within the imagination). This means that the understanding of the world around us and the creation of something new turn out to be not alternatives, but mutually reinforcing tasks. Dialectical thinking acts as a psychological mechanism for understanding consistent patterns and the creation of new things. The article concludes that developmental processes should be the most essential part of education. Creative thinking will develop provided that the processes of development are given to children as a problem that must be solved and not as information that must be learned. Consequently, children will simultaneously comprehend the world around them and learn to create something within it.

The article describes the theoretical foundations of the educational project “Transformation” project aimed at developing dialectical thinking in preschoolers and based on the “child’s participation principle” in the educational process. Dialectical thinking is understood to mean productive handling of the opposites which allows a person, on the one hand, to understand the world in the making, and, on the other, to produce a new creative product. This article describes the key points of the project: the dialectical structure of the developing world as an educational content, a dialectical task and the child participation principle. The author considers the specifics of implementing the “child’s participation principle” in the Transformation project: a child’s acquisition of cognitive means necessary for him to comprehend the development processes and, in particular, those in his own life when forecasting, planning and reflecting.

Background. The development of creative thinking is one of the important tasks of early childhood education. It is important to understand the role children’s activities, particularly story-telling, can play in this development. Of particular interest are narrative practices that create a social situation that supports children’s writing.

Objective: to analyze the influence of the narrative practice of “fairy tales with provocations” on the development of creative (dialectical) thinking of older preschoolers and individual parameters of fairy tale stories that children create.

Methods. The study involved 60 children aged 6-7 years. To diagnose creative (dialectical) thinking, the “What can happen at the same time?” (Veraksa N.E.) technique was used; to diagnose creative thinking and the ability to create symbolic images, the “Fire” subtest was used (the “Three Stories” method by Shiyan O.A.). We proposed the narrative practice “Fairy Tales with Provocations” as a way to activate children’s creative thinking.

Results. According to the results of the initial diagnostics, no significant differences were found; the results of the children in the experimental and control groups did not have any of the study parameters. The final diagnostics showed that in the control group no significant positive changes were found compared to the initial diagnosis in any of the studied parameters, while in the experimental group significant positive changes were found at a significant level in everyone according to all measurable parameters: creative (dialectical) thinking, creative transformations and artistic (symbolic) image in narratives, as well as the structure of narratives.

Conclusion. The study showed that the narrative practice “Fairy Tales with Provocations” is an adequate way to develop creative (dialectical) thinking, and also has a positive effect on the stories that children create: they become more complex and structured, they contain more creative transformations and artistic (symbolic) images. All this suggests that such symbolic activities as writing fairy tales are an important space for the development of children’s creativity. The results can be used to build educational work with children based on the resource of children’s activities.