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Background. Today’s common typologies and categories of children’s toys are mainly decided by the manufacturers and retailers of children’s products. Such categorizations are not based on a theoretical understanding of child development and therefore cannot provide information about the opportunities that toys provide for the young.

Objective. This study proposed three criteria for categorizing toys based on the cultural-historical approach: their degree of realism; their degree of anthropomorphism; and their degree of detail. These criteria were chosen as a result of an analysis of theoretical works carried out in the framework of cultural-historical approach.

Design. The proposed criteria were tested through an experiment measuring children’s toy preferences. The participants were 129 children of ages 3-4 years. Experimental data confirmed that most children do prefer realistic and detailed toys rather than those with fewer of these properties. The contribution of socio-demographic factors and the children’s individual developmental indicators to their toy preference was also analyzed.

Results. The study revealed that among various socio-demographic factors, only the child’s gender and the number of siblings in the family acted as significant predictors for the toy preferences. None of child’s developmental characteristics (non-verbal intelligence, executive functions, and emotional understanding) were found to be significant predictors of preference for particular toys.

Conclusions. The assumption that toys can be assessed in terms of their realism and degree of detail found empirical support. The results of this study may be useful in designing further research and in the practical issue of toy selection for children age 3-4 years.

Background. As educational systems around the globe increasingly focus on delivering outcomes and evidence of early childhood education, questions are asked about how increasing the cognitive load on children in preschool settings impacts their development.

Objective. To better understand this problem, a five-year programmatic study was funded by the Australian Research Council with the objective of researching conceptual play as an intervention, studying imagination in play and imagination in science, engineering, and technology.

Design. The study design featured 3,000 teachers, 100 families, and 120 focus infants and toddlers in Australia who were followed for five years.

Results. The study is currently underway. This paper gives an overview and conceptualisation of the research, and the midterm findings. The project expects to generate new knowledge about the concept formation of infants, toddlers, and pre-schoolers under the conditions of a Conceptual PlayWorld in play-based settings and homes.

Conclusion. The projected outcomes are expected to include understanding about how concepts can be intentionally taught in play settings and learned at home for particular cultural age periods. Significant benefits will include increased knowledge of how exposure to these concepts in the formative years affects children’s development.

The relevance of the topic of the article. Over the past 10 years, the level of development of the play of modern preschoolers continues to remain low. The researchers note the existence of different interpretations of the concept of “play“, which complicates the formation of a dialogue and provokes a gap between the declared value of the play and real practice. However, one of the possible reasons for the low level of development of the play in studies from different countries may also be the limitations of existing methods of studying the play. To conduct research on the conditions of the development of the play and its influence on children’s development, a special role is played by the selection of diagnostic techniques that should make it possible to see play in development.

The aim of the study: to analyze the advantages and limitations of existing diagnostic methods for children’s play.

Description of the research progress. In total, 18 methods were selected, the analysis included a comparison of different tools in terms of the possibility of assessing the development of play according to the following parameters: the method of studying the play, the features of the procedure and conditions of observation, the role of the observer, the evaluated aspects of children’s play.

Research results. A number of techniques have been identified that are most suitable for a comprehensive assessment of play, including for evaluating a developed play. The key deficiencies of existing methods were also identified: the contradiction of the evaluation procedure to the features of spontaneous play, the lack of an integrated approach to the study and focus on the affective side of the play, identifying only the current level of development of the play without taking into account its potential capabilities. The development of tools that allow us to see the play in development is a challenge for modern researchers.

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 describes the experience of applying the ideas of the cultural-historical approach in the field of support and determining the effectiveness of innovative educational organizations of the preschool education system. The author deals with the perspective of the cultural-historical approach, the cycle of innovative development of organization and contours the social situation of development, zone of actual development, zone of proximal development and the space of creativity realization in the process of determining the effectiveness of regional innovation platforms of preschool education. In the context of the listed scientific concepts, the innovative processes implemented by the regional innovation platforms are defined and their quality conditions are monitored. The materials presented in the article may be of interest to specialists who support innovative educational organizations of the preschool education system and serve as a starting point in organizing and conducting scientific and experimental work in this field.

Many studies have identified the positive link between imaginary play and emotion regulation in laboratory settings. However, little is known about how play and emotion regulation are related in everyday practice. This article examines how families use play as a tool to support young children’s emotion regulation in everyday family life. Two middle-class Australian families with children aged three years were studied over a six-month period (n = 30.75 hours of video observations and interviews). Findings show how manipulative play was used by parents during every day routines to mediate children’s emotions. Parents and children interact together to create an emotional zone of proximal development (ZPD) through play, suggesting that the development of emotion regulation is not an individual practice as identified in the literature, but collectively constructed. This study opens a new angle for understanding for a dialectical relation between manipulative play and children’s emotional development.

Parents and educators strive to help their children to develop optimally. Given the diversity of values and practices among dynamic modern populations it is important to understand all the dimensions that affect the development of children in their communities. A cultural-historical lens facilitates such a holistic understanding. Taking this lens, this article presents a model, developed with reference to cultural-historical theory and shows its application through reference to a study of three Hong Kong immigrant families in Australia. The model provides a traceable representation of the dynamic interactive processes and influences in a child’s development. It offers a template for the holistic analysis of the processes in a particular child’s development and guidelines for effective family pedagogy.

There is Vygotsky and Vygotsky. The Vygotsky who is still alive in his works and their thoughtful readers, and the Vygotsky «from textbooks». This is what Vygotsky looks like «in textbooks» schematically. According to his conception, a child does not develop on his own; he draws his «powers» for development from the sociocultural environment, which is created for him by an adult. To be more precise, it is created by his hands, his mind and, if he is lucky, by his heart. That is why when doing it, an adult acts not «on his own behalf» but «on his behalf and the behalf of the authority» of culture itself, which formed historically when he merely acts as an intermedium between culture and the child. In collaboration with an adult, a child learns cultural patterns – ways of interacting with human things, models of human behavior, samples of world perception, and criteria for evaluating what is happening in the world, deciphering «languages» – the symbols of the culture... And then he applies these patterns and codes to certain situations. It seems reasonable. But the social factors of child development (which included communications with an adult) were written about long before Vygotsky. Usually they were described as something imposed externally, something directive. From this perspective, development appeared to be a gradual «social enslavement», and they searched for the sources of freedom in the primal game of Mother Nature’s forces, which is natural for such logic. However, this «mother» is in some ways is a more rigid «dictator» than society. In fact, Vygotsky’s ideas are much deeper and more interesting.

Relevance. Observing the modern processes taking place in the educational society, it is impossible not to note the marked generation gap and, as a result, the depreciation of cultural ideals and values among young people and the younger generation. The article presents the experience of testing the pedagogical technology “Artifact”, based on the key ideas of the cultural and historical approach and designed to make cultural artifacts the semantic and value core of the educational process of a preschool educational organization.

Progress of the study. The study involved 147 preschoolers aged 4 to 7 years attending preschool educational organizations in Moscow and the Voronezh Region. The study was supposed to design a complex of psychological and pedagogical conditions for the development of a cultural sample by a child through the acquaintance of preschoolers with a cultural artifact, the restoration of cultural meanings and contexts, and to obtain products of children’s creativity (children’s artifacts) created on its basis.

The results of the study. In each age group participating in the study, the original cultural artifacts were identified and based on them, various children’s artifacts with partial or complete reproduction of mastered cultural samples were obtained using the Artifact technology.

Conclusions. A cultural artifact, as an entry point into culture under specially designed psychological and pedagogical conditions, is an object of cognition appropriate to preschool childhood and a source of a cultural sample offered to a child for development in the zone of proximal development. Being a part or the basis of a children’s creative product (children’s artifact), a cultural sample becomes a particle of the culture of the future and an important condition for the formation of a conscious and value-based attitude of the younger generation to cultural heritage. Thus, the Artifact technology has been successfully tested in the conditions of real pedagogical processes in kindergartens and can be recommended for solving problems related to the implementation of a value-oriented component of educational programs and the assignment of traditional Russian values by preschoolers.