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The author focuses on the issue of cognitive development in the process of environmental education as a means of socialization for 5-6 year-old children, and explores the modern pedagogical approach to the issue of child socialization, proving its necessity for human development at every age. The paper reveals the potentialities of the system of environmental education in the cognitive and social development of 5-6 year-olds in light of Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, and presents concrete models for working with preschool children within the framework of the traditional Young Ecologist Programme, aimed at helping children in their indicative-symbolic and research activities. The possibility of including the family in the process of educational and social development of preschoolers is outlined in the paper.

The article is devoted to the elaboration of a methodological guidance for environmental education of preschool children. It provides a theoretical analysis of issues in preschool institution guidance, in general, and environmental education, in particular. It explains the need for a new approach – “analytical and corrective interaction” (ACI) – in the methodological guidance of environmental education in a preschool center aiming at care-givers’ professional and personal self-development, enhancing their environmental culture and its formation of the latter in children. It discloses the essence, content and procedural algorithm of analytical and corrective interaction, the specificity and sequence of its implementation stages. The article discusses the results of testing the new approach to methodical guidance, specific features of ACI implementation in practice, the content of a methodologist’s activity, the nature of his management, which determines the efficiency of interaction, manifestations of teachers in the process of experimentation. It shows this unique methodology of environmental education as a relatively new trend in preschool pedagogy which forms the basis of a system of working with children and which should be communicated to kindergarten teachers in the process of analytical and corrective interaction. The results of the study make it possible to determine the effectiveness of ACI research and experimental testing. The article is addressed to environmentalists, methodologists of preschool educational institutions, students and teachers at teacher training institutions and researchers.

Today the environmental education of preschool children is top of the agenda. If we fail to explain and teach kids to love and respect nature, they are bound to be indifferent to it when they grow up. Every kid needs to know that if we do not take care of nature, we are in for an environmental disaster. We, people, must help nature. Children need to know that deforestation, air pollution, destruction of rare plants and forest fires are all leading our planet into an environmental abyss. This project is intended to teach children to see the beauty of nature, to learn what good trees, in our case the birch tree, can do, to talk about the beauty of Russian forests, songs that have been sung, poetry written in praise of it, to watch the birch tree in different seasons.