Lumps, bushings and flaps. What to play with a preschooler so that parents don’t get bored
Role-playing games (all these endless tea parties, pony towns and traffic jams of cars all over the room) are an important stage in a child’s development. We talked about why they are needed, what they influence, and whether adults can learn to play with RAO Academician Alexander Veraksa and researchers from the Department of Educational Psychology and Pedagogy, Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov.
Useful Mela newsletter twice a week: Tuesday and Friday
SUBSCRIBE
How preschoolers play
There are no mandatory games that would be interesting to all children without exception. But we can say that most often preschoolers play at family, school, work, or act out heroic, military stories, as well as scenes from cartoons, literary works and computer games. In addition, games for girls and boys may differ slightly in plot.
Boys like robots, transformers, cars, and often the plots of boys' games are connected specifically with their adventures. Girls tend to pay more attention to social relationships and building stories based on real life. There are, of course, common recurring types of plots, but their content and the variety of developments will differ from child to child.
What is a role-playing game?
As Lev Vygotsky wrote, in play a child cries like a patient, but rejoices like a player. And it is in play that a preschooler develops in the most harmonious way.
Vera Sukhikh, researcher at the Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosova:
The value of mature role-playing games lies precisely in the fact that the child is simultaneously in two spaces.
Distinctive features of a mature role-playing game:
- a cooperative game in which participants create a detailed plot;
- the content of the game is the building of certain social relationships;
- The roles of children in such a game are varied.
Advanced play involves a planning stage, during which children agree on what and how they will play. And the game is built according to the logic of an imaginary situation, which allows the child to escape reality and act based on his ideas. D. B. Elkonin, characterizing the real relationships of children in the game, Fr.
And one more very important point. Playing is a purely voluntary matter; it is impossible and unnecessary to force people to play. If a child refuses an adult’s proposals, you can only try again after some time. Look for what is really relevant and interesting for the child at a particular moment. Adult participation in the game should not be directive. If a child is already passionate about a game, an adult can ask to become a participant, but to start controlling it would mean ruining the game.
Photo: shutterstock / LightField Studios
When to start playing
Parents often worry that their one-year-old or even two-year-old child does not know how to play role-playing games and does not interact with other children. He prefers to play alone, and his gaming activity is far from what the media broadcasts.
Margarita Gavrilova, researcher at the Faculty of Psychology, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosova,
reassures me that this is completely normal.
The ability to play - to construct interesting plots, portray characters, create a game situation from available objects - does not arise in a child immediately, but develops with age. Psychologists identify several stages of its development: from ordinary play with objects to complex games with a long plot and distribution of roles between two or more children. It’s really too early in the year to play tea party. But an adult can and should support the process of game development.
Role-playing games by age:
2–3 years
. At this age, you need to show your child how familiar objects can be used in different ways. For example, a simple banana in a game can easily become a gun, a telephone, or even a little man. A child’s ability to find different ways to use objects contributes to a rich imagination and the creation of play “substitutions.” Then the lack of the necessary toy will not become an obstacle for the child to play out the plot. And in adult life, this skill will help you find a lot of solutions to everyday and creative problems.
3–4 years.
With a preschooler of this age, you can already play out small role-playing dialogues, create and develop imaginary “as if” situations. Children willingly take on different characters. So, a child playing doctor gives injections to everyone. A girl playing mother-daughter rolls a stroller with a baby doll. To “get into character,” a child needs to learn to notice the characteristic behavior of his characters.
The adult’s task is to support the child’s play motivation and gradually enrich the plot and the child’s ideas about a particular role.
For example, when a child growls, imitating a tiger cub, you can ask him what mood the tiger cub is in today or how he ended up in a city apartment.
5 years.
Role-playing play becomes natural, children are easily drawn into it and can build plots themselves. But the participation of an adult is still important, since he can significantly enrich the game and show various game patterns or solutions. For example, offer unexpected plot twists or new ways of arranging the gaming space.
The game helps the child navigate social relationships and see any situation from the perspective of several of its participants.
An important feature of role-playing games is the child’s need for a partner. It is in the plot-role-playing game that the distribution of roles and interaction of characters first appears. The developmental value of such a game is that the child, with the help of his imagination, creates a unique play space in which he models and plays out the processes of the real world.
How long should you play?
A survey conducted among thousands of parents and grandparents showed that while grandparents enjoy playing with their grandchildren most and truly understand the importance of play, many parents tend to prefer digital gadgets in the hands of a child.
Vera Sukhikh
I am sure that it is not necessary to play with your child all day: “You can play for 15–30 minutes and not even every day. It is important that this is done regularly, that the games are varied and that the parent himself finds it interesting. The rest of the time, the child should have the opportunity to play alone or with other children. To do this, it is important to create a cozy space, with a sufficient number of toys, cubes, waste materials, fabrics that can be used to create a play space or impromptu outfits.”
We play by the rules
It’s worth getting a whole box for a role-playing game and putting “garbage” in it, like cardboard tubes, unnecessary boxes, scarves, hats, sheets, pine cones, etc. It’s good if the fabrics are of different sizes, colors, and densities. All this can be bought at a regular fabric store or collected from unnecessary items. From ordinary foil you can twist a sword, a helmet, a crown, a spaceship steering wheel, armor, precious stones and much more that you need in the game. All this encourages children to use their imagination, which means the game becomes educational.
4 simple rules for a successful game:
1.
There should be enough time to prepare for the game: figure out what to play, build houses, create costumes, start playing and develop the plot.
2.
A complex role-playing game can last from one hour to several days. Therefore, it’s great if there is an opportunity not to remove the decorations for some time.
3.
It’s good if there is enough space to freely build and move during the game, and make noise.
4.
It is not recommended to use ready-made toys and costumes as attributes for the game. It is better to adapt what is already in the environment, to use “open” materials: fabrics, ribbons, paper, foil, etc. This will enrich the child’s imagination and help him see the hidden properties of objects familiar in everyday life.
Vera Sukhikh:
A child can only play what is known to him from experience. Therefore, one of the most important tasks of parents is to enrich the child’s experience: visit new places, read new books, tell and show new phenomena, professions, situations.
Nikolay Veraksa, professor of the Faculty of Psychology of M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, head of the UNESCO Department of Early Childhood Care and Education:
The game should constantly include more and more new situations.
But these situations cannot be arbitrary; they must reflect the real life of adults, their culture. Children at play create situations that are relevant to the life scenarios that unfold around them. Photo: shutterstock / LightField Studios
Why do we need a game at all?
Play activity is the only thing that a preschooler essentially needs. And if it is accompanied by adults, it acquires special value. Recent studies by the Russian Academy of Education have shown that role-playing games with the participation of parents significantly influence the development of the child’s self-regulation components.
Self-regulation is the basis of human adaptability. It allows a person to behave in accordance with the rules of the situation, adapt to their changes and achieve their goals despite distractions. Self-regulation is conventionally divided into cognitive and emotional. Cognitive is associated with remembering and using information, switching from one situation to another, and restraining immediate desires. And emotional is understanding and managing emotions.
The link between self-regulation and academic achievement, such as math and reading skills, and successful social adjustment is evident as early as kindergarten. And it is the development of self-regulation that helps a child prepare for school, and subsequently be successful in adulthood. According to Alexander Veraksa, “self-regulation affects the overall ability to manage oneself, one’s emotions and behavior, work productively, maintain career development and feel happy.”
Main components of self-regulation:
- Inhibitory control (inhibition)
helps keep attention, thoughts, and behavior on task and not distracted by irrelevant stimuli, internal or external. For example, raising your hand and waiting in line, restraining the impulse to jump up from your seat and shout out the correct answer, is a task that requires a high level of development of inhibition in the child. - Working memory
is a “compartment” of memory that contains information that a person is working with right now. For example, mental arithmetic requires developed working memory because it involves performing arithmetic operations on numbers that need to be remembered. - Cognitive flexibility
allows you to switch between different rules when performing a task, and in general, between activities and tasks. Cognitive flexibility underlies adaptability to the external environment, since it allows, for example, to quickly and adequately change one’s behavior in different circumstances.
Research has shown that where children create games, there is greater emotional engagement. And where the plot is suggested by an adult, inhibitory control develops better, because in such a game you have to wait your turn and fulfill your role consistently.
To develop self-regulation, many digital games and simulators have been developed. They are certainly attractive for parents, because the child can be left alone with the gadget. However, although progress in their development will certainly be noticeable, unfortunately, it may be limited only to the space of a particular application and will not affect the child’s real life.
Alexander
Veraksa:
Using a natural method of cognition - trial and error - a child can identify some options for using a gadget independently, without the help of adults. For example, a preschooler can independently master the game Angry Birds. Almost the entire plot of the game is that the player is presented with a situation in which birds are considered as projectiles. Bird shells are launched to destroy enemy defenses. As the player progresses, he is offered similar situations in which achieving the goal becomes more and more difficult. On the one hand, this is really a game: it has rules and a conventional situation. The child joins it voluntarily and experiences positive emotions. But in these kinds of games there is no way to agree on rules and roles. The game creates a conditional space that has no exit to the outside. The child does not have the opportunity to present in a real social environment the experience that he will gain when mastering the game. It lacks role relationships and the need to address culture and verbal communication.
And traditional games - board games, action games and role-playing games - turn out to be much more effective. A role-playing game is a much more complex activity than any game on a phone or tablet, and its developmental effect is complex and more lasting.
Photo: shutterstock/fizkes
