Abstract

Background. The relevance of this article is primarily due to the fact that the potential of artistic development of children is greatly underestimated in pedagogical practice. The authors presume that a person is initially gifted with “inner activity of the soul” (V.V. Zenkovsky) — the creative potential in some general, non-specialized form — and the desire to actualize it in life. From this perspective, the child is considered as a creative being by nature, as a carrier of the creative potential, often manifested as artistic creativity. 

Objective. The authors strive to draw attention to various prerequisites of artistic development, which children of sensitive age are endowed with. At the same time, two aspects of artistic giftedness differ: individual and age-wide or generic. The article discusses the latter. 

Results. Psychological prerequisites associated with the recognized achievements of children from senior preschool to primary school age in various types of artistic creativity are considered. These prerequisites include the so-called children’s animism, understood as a willingness to treat everything in the world as living and related to oneself. Artistic creativity is also associated with interest and emotional responsiveness to a variety of sensory impressions, which are much less typical for older age. Specifics of children’s imagination — the ability to directly express feelings in a figurative form — is regarded as another psychological prerequisite for achievements in artistic creativity. 

The main focus of the work is on children’s play as an early form of creative potential manifestation, in which the child’s readiness for productive artistic creativity develops. From this point of view, the stages of the development of children’s play are consistently considered. At each of the stages a special kind of prerequisites for future artistic creativity is formed. These stages include a subject game, a plot-role-playing game, a dramatization game, and a “lonely” director’s game, psychologically the closest to the real work of an artist-author. For each stage, recommendations are given concerning the participation of an adult in the child’s game. Moreover, the most productive or, on the contrary, undesirable forms of adult participation are described from the perspective of the child’s artistic development. 

Conclusions. The materials of the article allow us to assert that a full gaming experience is an important condition for the successful artistic development of a child. The task of an adult participant in the game is to meet the child’s play initiative, contributing to its fullest expression in cultural forms.