THE DEVELOPMENT OF CURIOSITY OF CHILDREN OF SENIOR PRESCHOOL AGE IN EDUCATIONAL COMMUNICATION WITH NATURE

The state of present society characterized by the scientific and technological breakthroughs, information resources variety and accessibility causes the necessity of training of curious, active and initiative younger generation ready for future inventions, aimed at the search for unknown information and the acquisition of the ways of its obtaining. In this context, at the moment, the problem of development of curiosity in children starting from preschool age is important. The paper presents the experience of implementing a complex of educational situations of communication of children with nature into the educational process to develop the curiosity of 5–6-year children. The authors studied the level of development of curiosity of children during the educational process in a preschool educational organization. As a multi-component integrative characteristic, curiosity was studied in the process of observations, conversations, using the author’s techniques of assessment of response, creativity, self-consistency, and empathy to the new.

To develop curiosity, the authors used a complex of educational situations of communication of children with nature the peculiarities of which are the creation of educational situations based on the algorithm including a problematic question, children’s questions activation, a discussion with children, the support of children’s utterances with interesting facts, and specifying the possibility of further independent search; the application of ecological empathy method, a dialogue with nature, the ecological care method, the environmental-pedagogical training, the method of indirect communication of children with nature based on the material of artistic works about nature. The study revealed positive dynamics in all specified criteria, showed the dependence of curiosity development level on the algorithm of organizing an educational situation of communication of children with nature and building a complex of educational situations based on environmental education methods.