Nadezhda A. Vershinina

This article unfolds the specifics of how various forms of home-based preschool education are employed in the Russian Federation. Home-based preschool education and care is a new form of education for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers and can be differently organized from a legal point of view. The authors define typical models of early childhood education and care in homeschool environments: tutoring services, family-run preschool groups, family-run kindergartens, and home-based kindergartens. This article pays special attention to those models of homeschool education where the caregiver is a mother of one, some, or all of the children, and the pedagogical process occurs in the apartment or private home of the mother-caregiver. Research was conducted in the form of content analysis of discussions between mother-caregivers on the social network “vkontakte.” Through this research, the authors discovered some typical difficulties of early childhood education and care in homeschool environments. The following issues were discovered in home-based preschool classrooms: organizational issues associated with receiving approval for the opening of a home-based preschool classroom from educational authorities, from the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing, and from the Fire Oversight; the establishment of labour relations with the head preschool; pedagogical problems with respect to the design and implementation of the preschool curriculum, the organization of individual and group educational situations, and the arrangement of informative walks. In family-run preschools problems have arisen in relation to the legal arrangements necessary for a self-employed person, bookkeeping and work without fines, as well as with attracting potential clients for paid preschool education and/or the caring and supervising of children. Within the article, the necessity of quality assurance in home-based preschool classrooms is pinpointed and solutions to these problems are suggested.

The article concerns art as an educational resource, using of this resource in the pedagogical activity supports education, care and the development of personality. Majority of adults educating preschoolers do not possess the understanding of subject matter of the art in system, its functions, meaning for education and technologies of working with kids through art. That is why the question of their training in this area has been examined. This article proves the importance of the collaborative education for adults working with the preschoolers on the base of art pedagogy, which is the pedagogical movement to solve educational problems with art. The results, gained from a poll, of self-assessment related to the competences of adults in the area of using art in pedagogical activity are presented. For better understanding of the perception of art by adults who are teachers of different subjects or family members, it is suggested to discuss the structure of the artistic image in accordance with a scheme that reflects the structure of the interrelations of its components. The specifics of pedagogical activity with works of art are revealed and the stereotypes and limits of perception of the artistic image, caused by the professional specialization of educating adults are presented. The authors show the possibilities for cooperative solutions of educational tasks in the application of artworks by educators of different specialties. Conclusions about the feasibility of collaborative education of adults, teaching preschoolers through the methods of art pedagogy, and mastering the language of art are drawn.