Academic literature on the topic 'Narratives, Preschoolers, School Age Children'

ABSTRACTIn this study we investigate the re-introduction of referents in the Frog stories told by Italian children aged 4–10 (N = 100). We found that for every age group full nouns are the most frequent forms used for reference re-introduction. Null forms, such as clitic pronouns or person/number inflection on the verb, are the second most frequent forms. A detailed analysis of null forms shows that children of different ages exploit different properties of the verbal and non-verbal context which can make a referent predictable. Compared to preschoolers, elementary school children are more likely to use null forms when the semantic content of the verb, or the structure of the preceding text make referents inferrable. On the other hand, preschoolers tend to exploit the importance of a character in the story plot, or the visual availability of the referent in the non-verbal context, as properties that make an entity salient enough to prevent the speaker from using overt linguistic forms such as full nouns. Our study confirms results of previous research, showing that elementary school children are more competent than preschoolers in integrating the semantic content of the current utterance into the context generated by previous discourse.

A narrative topic is a means of the communicative text organization, expressed by adverbs of place or time, that are located at the beginning of an utterance and do not carry any communicative function within the information structure of the utterance itself. An experimental study of oral unprepared stories produced by children of senior preschool and primary school age has shown that a narrative topic appears in their narratives only when the narrator cannot construct a text in advance and is forced to describe events simultaneously with their observation.

ABSTRACTThe goal of this study was to trace the dual language development of the narrative macrostructure in three age groups of Russian–German bilingual children and to compare the performance of simultaneous and sequential bilinguals. Fine-grained analyses of macrostructure included three components: story structure, story complexity, and internal state terms. Oral narratives were elicited via the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. Fifty-eight Russian–German speaking bilingual children from three age groups participated: preschoolers (mean age = 45 months) and elementary school pupils (mean age first grade = 84 months, mean age third grade = 111 months); and there were 34 simultaneous and 24 sequential bilinguals. The results showed significant improvement for all three components of macrostructure between the preschool and first-grade period. Additional significant development from first to third graders was found only for story complexity in Russian. This is explained by the Russian curriculum explicitly teaching narrative skills during early literacy training. In the two older groups, simultaneous bilinguals showed advantages over sequential bilinguals, for story complexity only. This finding suggests considering bilingual type when evaluating narrative skills of bilinguals. The results indicate cross-language association of only some components of narrative score across languages. The findings support the examination of various constituents of macrostructure when evaluating its development as well as the progression of narrative skills.

AbstractDespite the importance of understanding the narrative abilities of bilingual children, minimal research has focused on Spanish–English bilingual preschoolers. Therefore, this study examined the cross-language macrostructure and within-language microstructure relations in the English and Spanish narratives of bilingual preschoolers and examined whether language dominance impacted these relations. Narratives were elicited from 200 preschool-aged children of Latino heritage. Microstructure measures included the number of different words, the mean length of utterance in words, and the subordination index. The narrative scoring scheme measured macrostructure (Heilmann, Miller, Nockerts, & Dunaway, 2010). Using standardized language testing of expressive vocabulary and sentence comprehension, the children were classified into two groups: balanced dominance and Spanish dominant. Results revealed that English macrostructure and Spanish macrostructure were not related after controlling for microstructure measures within languages. Children’s microstructure abilities in each language were strongly related to their macrostructure abilities within that language. Dominance did not moderate these relations. Consistent with previous research on school-age children, vocabulary was a unique predictor of macrostructure production. This study highlights the additional importance of utterance length within both languages to macrostructure during the preschool years. The absence of unique cross-language macrostructure relations and the absence of dominance group moderation may have been due to the immaturity of the children’s narratives.

The article considers the main stages of forming skills of creative narrative (story-telling) in pre-school age children; are listed effective techniques to stimulate creative preschoolers’ speech activity.

Despite much research on Chinese children’s learning achievement, little research exists on their early development of beliefs about learning. This study examined the perceptions of purposes for and affective and value expression toward learning among 129 Chinese preschoolers aged 3–6 years. To tap culturally valid perspectives, free narratives prompted by story beginnings and responses to probes about books and school scenarios were collected and analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. We identified four types of benefits from learning that children revealed: (1) Intellectual benefits emphasising acquisition of skill, continuous personal growth, and ‘‘a lot’’ of knowledge; (2) respect/admiration for learning; (3) social benefits for others; and (4) economic benefits. Children also expressed highly positive feelings and value toward learning. These trends increased with age. The findings are discussed in light of Chinese cultural values of learning and their influence on children’s development of beliefs about learning.

Socioeconomic disparities increase the probability that children will enter school behind their more advantaged peers. Early intervention on language skills may enhance language and literacy outcomes, reduce the gap and, eventually, promote school readiness of low-SES (Socioeconomic Status) children. This study aimed to analyze the feasibility and effectiveness of a brief narrative-based intervention (treatment vs. control group) aimed to foster broad oral language skills in preschoolers (N = 69; Mean age = 5.5, SD = 4 months) coming from low-SES families. Moreover, it was analyzed whether children’s initial vocabulary mediates the intervention’s responsiveness. Results have shown that children in treatment group obtained greater gains than children in control group in almost all intervention-based measures. There is also some evidence for the generalizability of the intervention to other skills not directly trained during the intervention. Moreover, it was found that children’s initial vocabulary mediates the intervention’s responsiveness showing that children with high vocabulary made greater gains in higher-level components of language comprehension, whereas children with low vocabulary made higher gains in vocabulary. Taken together, our findings suggest that a relatively brief, but quite intensive narrative-based intervention, may produce improvements on broad oral language skills in preschoolers from low-SES backgrounds.

The paper presents research findings with 56 Roma children from Macedonia and Serbia between the ages of 3-6 years. The children’s knowledge of Romani as their mother tongue was assessed with a specially designed test. The test measures the children’s comprehension and production of different types of grammatical knowledge such as wh–questions, wh-complements, passive verbs, possessives, tense, aspect, the ability of the children to learn new nouns and new adjectives, and repetition of sentences. In addition, two pictured narratives about Theory of Mind were given to the children. The hypothesis of the authors was that knowledge of the complex grammatical categories by children will help them to understand better the Theory of Mind stories. The results show that Roma children by the age of 5 know most of the grammatical categories in their mother tongue and most of them understand Theory of Mind. References Bakalar, P. (2004). The IQ of Gypsies in Central Europe. 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Twenty economically disadvantaged preschoolers (mean age 3;7) were randomly assigned to an intervention or a control group, and their mothers' styles of eliciting narratives from their children were assessed before and after intervention. Mothers of intervention children were encouraged to spend more time in narrative conversation, ask more open-ended and context-eliciting questions, and encourage longer narratives through back-channel responses. Children's narrative and vocabulary skills were assessed before and after the year-long intervention and 14 children participated in a follow-up assessment a year later. Narrative measures included the number and length of narratives as well as how decontextualized and informative they were. Intervention children showed significant vocabulary improvement immediately after intervention terminated, and a year later they showed overall improvements in narrative skill. In particular, intervention children produced more context-setting descriptions about where and especially when the described events took place. Such decontextualized language has been emphasized as important for literacy acquisition.

The onset of the use of narratives represents a fundamental step in an advanced phase of language development. Indeed, to tell or to understand a story, a child must be able to consider and integrate linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities (Boudreau & Chapman, 2000; Karmiloff & Karmiloff-Smith, 2001). Moreover, narratives evaluation is seen by several authors as a “naturalistic” approach in the study of language development, because narratives represent a real and contextualized request for children (Schraeder, Quinn, Stockman & Miller, 1999). Narrative’s analysis, considering the several competences needed to tell a story, allows a multilevel approach in the study of language development. The dissertation presents four studies conducted within this PhD project which aims at deepen the knowledge of narrative competence in children, through a multilevel approach. The first chapter presents a new tool developed for the assessment of narrative competence, the Narrative Competence Task (NCT). It presents a scoring system based on the vast literature on this topic and that aims to be usable both in research and in the clinical field. Finally, it shows the NCT’s validity in analysing the development of narrative competence in children from 3 to 8 years. The second chapter aims of to analyse gestural and verbal production when preschool-aged children are telling a story (NCT). The focus is to describe the gestures used by children and the relationships between the use of gestures and measures of narrative’s competence. The communicative functions of the gestures is considered to determine whether gestures play an essential role in the narrative production of preschool-aged children or if they serve only an enrichment role. The third chapter includes three studies focused on intonation during story-telling: Study 1 investigates longitudinally in a group of preschool children the relationships among narrative skills, syntax, and prosody; Study 2 describes the intonation used in narratives by children and adults within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework, a model recently adopted in the international filed but not yet been used in studies of Italian children’s intonation; finally, Study 3 investigates the prosody of children and adults’ narratives as a cue of pre-planning. The fourth chapter focuses on the relationships between narrative competence and reading and writing abilities. Specifically, the aim is to verify the possible associations among different aspects of narrative competence and reading and writing abilities, considering both the automatisms (decoding and spelling) and the more complex aspects of learning (text comprehension and production), in the first three years of primary school attendance. Taken together the studies presented in the dissertation highlight the potentialities of narratives in the study of language development and, through the multilevel approach in its study, deepen our knowledge on language acquisition during the preschool and school-age period and its relationships with general cognitive development.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2001.
"A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences). The University of Hong Kong, May 4, 2001." Also available in print.

Many children identified with Language Impairment (LI) demonstrate difficulty comprehending and producing narratives. Their narratives are often structurally less complex and of overall poorer quality than those produced by their typically developing peers. These difficulties may negatively impact the academic and social success of children with LI. This thesis evaluates the performance of five school-aged children with LI on a story retell probe embedded within an intervention designed to address their social and emotional language abilities. During the 10-week intervention, participants completed a series of story retell probes using wordless picture books. The story stimuli were taken from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument, which included six stories (divided into two story sets), elicited twice (12 total story retells). The production of story grammar (SG) categories was analyzed for each story retell. The results for each participant and SG category varied greatly, but all participants had difficulty producing the more complex SG elements. Although each participant demonstrated some improvement from the first retell to the second on at least one story, overall performance remained fairly stable over the 10-week period. Future research is needed to determine effective ways to support more complex story narratives in children with LI.

This cross-validation study investigated the extent that a Spanish narrative language dynamic assessment accurately identified students with and without language disorder across three separate samples of bilingual and monolingual Spanish-speaking students from Guatemala, Mexico, and the U.S. Students with language disorder and students with typically developing language were administered a narrative dynamic assessment in Spanish. A test-teach-retest format of dynamic assessment was followed and student modifiability, or learning ability, was rated directly following the teaching phase of the assessment. Results indicated that the most predictive dynamic assessment variables for the Guatemalan sample were posttest scores combined with two separate modifiability measures (i.e., total modifiability scores and modifiability final judgment scores). These same variables were applied in the cross-validation classification analyses of the Mexico and U.S. samples with good classification accuracy achieved. The results of this study indicate that a Spanish narrative dynamic assessment may be a culturally appropriate diagnostic tool in identifying Spanish-speaking students with language disorder.

The purpose of this study was to examine and cross-validate how well a dynamic assessment of language can accurately identify a large sample of school-age students with a representative ratio of language disorder. The participants included 362 school-age children with and without language disorder from kindergarten to sixth grade in Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming. Each participant received a battery of assessments including a dynamic assessment of narrative language. The dynamic assessment investigated in this study demonstrated good to excellent levels of sensitivity and specificity. The results of this study also determined that, in concurrence with previous dynamic assessment research, posttest and modifiability scores were most predictive of language ability. The results of this study indicate that the DYMOND may be a valid and accurate tool when identifying language disorders in school-age populations.

Numerous studies have shown that children identified with Language Impairment (LI) have marked difficulty with producing story narratives compared to their typically developing peers. One particular area of weakness seen in the narratives of children with LI is their ability to incorporate internal states, specifically internal response, internal plan, and emotion words. The current study examines five children with LI and their descriptions of mental and emotional states of characters in story narratives under spontaneous and prompted conditions. Participants produced story retells based on a series of wordless picture books taken from the Edmonton Narrative Norms Instrument. Story retells were elicited twice for each story, once with and once without verbal prompts. As expected, children produced more internal state story elements in response to prompts. As children produced more of these elements, however, their accuracy decreased, and the states they reported did not always reflect the story content. The children with LI showed limited understanding and ability to interpret the reactions, motivations, and emotions that characters experienced. However, verbal prompts did reveal children's current abilities and understanding of internal states.

Dissertação de Mestrado em Psicologia Educacional
O presente estudo teve como objectivos averiguar se o tipo de discurso, narrativo ou descritivo e a execução de uma produção escrita, influenciavam a retenção/recordação de informação em crianças dos 9 aos 11 anos de idade, sobre o acontecimento de uma visita ao Oceanário de Lisboa. A situação experimental englobou uma amostra de 108 crianças, entre os 9 e os 11 anos de idade, provenientes de 4 escolas do Io Ciclo do Ensino Básico. A divisão desta amostra processa-se do seguinte modo: 1 Grupo Narrativo, 1 Grupo Descritivo e 1 Grupo Sem Verbalização. Distinguindo-se dentro de cada grupo, dois subgrupos, pela execução ou não de produção escrita após o acontecimento, prefazendo um total de 6 subgrupos independentes e equivalentes com 18 crianças cada. O mesmo acontecimento foi apresentado de três modos diferentes aos três grupos. A um dos grupos o acontecimento foi acompanhado de uma verbalização do tipo narrativo, a outro a mesma informação foi apresentada de forma descritiva e ao terceiro grupo não foi dada essa informação. Ocorrem três momentos de recolha de dados, onde foi pedido às crianças através da recordação livre, informação respeitante ao acontecimento. Os três momentos são: a Produção Escrita - logo após o acontecimento (a apenas três dos subgrupos), o Io Pós-teste - logo após o acontecimento, e o 2o Pós-teste - uma semana após o acontecimento. As quatro hipóteses de investigação colocadas incidiam sobre a influência da verbalização, o tipo de discurso apresentado e a existência de produção escrita, na quantidade de informação retida/recordada pelas crianças. Assim, esperava-se que as crianças que recordassem mais informação fossem: as sujeitas à verbalização; ao tipo de discurso narrativo; que efectuassem uma produção escrita e ainda a conjugação do tipo de discurso narrativo com a produção escrita. A análise estatística teve como base os testes: Mann Whitney, Wilcoxon e Anova Oneway. Os resultados corroboraram as quatro hipóteses colocadas inicialmente, revelando que as crianças cujo acontecimento foi acompanhado de verbalização, foram as que mais informação recordaram. Ocorrendo o mesmo quando o discurso era do tipo narrativo. Comprovando-se ainda que a produção escrita facilitou a recordação e mais ainda se associada ao tipo de discurso narrativo. Os resultados sugerem que a verbalização, em especial o tipo de discurso apresentado influencia a organização da memória das crianças. Os desempenhos dos três grupos de crianças revelaram-se muito diferentes, tendo as crianças de verbalização narrativa mais beneficiado do tipo de discurso na recordação do acontecimento. A produção escrita revelou-se também benéfica no desenvolvimento e reorganização do pensamento. Este estudo pretende contribuir para realçar a importância da apresentação de informação em experiências de vida, de modo que as crianças possam beneficiar em pleno das informações que lhes são transmitidas.

Dissertação de Mestrado em Psicologia Educacional
O presente estudo pretendeu investigar os efeitos provenientes da forma de apresentação de um acontecimento na memória de crianças em idade pré-escolar. Com base num acontecimento “Fazer Bolos de nozes e chocolate", com uma estrutura logicamente ordenada, criaram-se assim, quatro condições experimentais para o efeito: uma situação denominada Não Verbal, onde não ocorria um acompanhamento verbal do adulto aquando da apresentação de cartões com as imagens referentes às acções do acontecimento, e três condições verbais, nas quais o acompanhamento verbal do adulto surgia a par da apresentação das imagens, assumindo três formatos específicos, Script, História, ou Descrição. Com base na manipulação da forma de apresentação e do tipo de discurso utilizado pelo adulto previram-se duas hipóteses. Na primeira hipótese postulámos, que as crianças sujeitas ao acompanhamento verbal do adulto durante a apresentação do acontecimento iriam apresentar um desempenho superior em relação às crianças da modalidade não verbal. Sugerimos ainda numa segunda hipótese, tendo em conta os três estilos linguísticos das modalidades verbais, que a verbalização do adulto num formato tipo script providenciaria uma superioridade no desempenho das crianças, comparativamente aos restantes formatos verbais, História e Descrição. Para estudar estes efeitos, avaliámos a recordação livre efectuada pelas crianças em três momentos, Recordação Imediata 1 (correspondente à primeira apresentação do acontecimento); Recordação Imediata 2 (a seguir à repetição da apresentação do acontecimento); e Recordação Diferida (após uma semana). A partir destas recordações, feitas nestes três momentos, analisámos a quantidade de informação recordada; a organização da informação recordada, o nível de discurso relativo à recordação da criança, e os conteúdos recordados. Na experiência participaram 128 crianças do pré-escolar de 9 Jardins de Infância pertencentes à Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Cascais. A análise dos resultados veio revelar que as crianças das modalidades verbais beneficiaram da verbalização do adulto, apresentando um melhor desempenho que as crianças da modalidade não verbal. Constatámos que estas últimas recordaram menos informação acerca do acontecimento, e fizeram-no de forma mais incompleta e parcial, referindo menos acções completas e mais acções isoladas (sem incluir os seus alvos e. complementos) e elementos isolados (objectos e ingredientes, sem referir as acções a desempenhar com eles), do que as crianças das modalidades verbais. Por seu turno, também se registou na situação não verbal um maior número de intrusões na recordação. Os efeitos da ausência de verbalização do adulto também foram observados numa menor capacidade das crianças desta condição ordenarem temporalmente o acontecimento, reflectindo-se consequentemente, num menor nível de estruturação da própria verbalização que realizaram a propósito da recordação do acontecimento. Das situações verbais abordadas, a verbalização do adulto num formato de um script veio a demonstrar maiores benefícios na recordação das crianças, comparativamente com os restantes formatos verbais. As crianças desta condição recordaram uma maior quantidade de unidades de informação pertencentes ao acontecimento, e numa forma verbal mais completa, referindo mais acções com os seus alvos e complementos e uma menor quantidade de intrusões, do que as das restantes condições verbais. Também foi nesta condição que se encontraram os maiores níveis de informação ordenada canonicamente e consequentemente, os níveis mais elevados de estruturação do discurso produzido pelas próprias crianças, resultante da sua recordação livre a propósito do acontecimento apresentado. Estes resultados sugerem que a linguagem organizou a memória e que as crianças do nosso estudo foram sensíveis ao estilo linguístico do adulto. Dependendo do formato verbal utilizado pelo adulto para apresentar o acontecimento geraram-se desempenhos muito diferenciados, nos quais o script se veio a destacar, favorecendo o acesso à representação do acontecimento, a recordação e a descrição verbal do mesmo.

This book takes as its subject the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The works discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults: serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak and Faiza Guène’s Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai’s autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala; or else stories that take young people as their primary subjects, novels such as Sapphire’s Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education and development around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this study considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gain. Especially interested in the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate as forms in the contemporary school story, The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) children are more at risk for mathematical difficulties than hearing children. The few studies that have focused on preschoolers showed that even at this age DHH children already lag behind their hearing peers. Early math skills are important for later mathematics performance and school success in general, so early stimulation of these skills is needed. Research has shown that the home environment plays an important role in the development of early math skills. Because parent–child math activities predict later achievement, it is important to increase parents’ awareness of the importance of math activities for young DHH children. This chapter focuses on early math skills in DHH children and describes how parents can enhance these skills in the home environment.

AbstractEducational philosopher Maxine Greene called for the “centrality of the arts” to education at all levels decades ago, yet the aesthetic core of education has been often negated to the margin or completely forgotten in public education. What is desperately needed in formal education is what Greene termed as “wide-awakeness” or “being attentive to the beauty and cruelty of life, to “aesthetic encounters” and “living in the world esthetically.” Reflecting on recent conversations with her three school-age children, the author draws upon multimodel narratives, including her lived curriculum in mainland China and the United States and her children’s experiences with formal education in Canada, to warn of the potential numbing effects of school science curricula and pedagogy in public education. Finally a few strategies for centering the aesthetics are proposed to hopefully immunize ourselves and students against the potential numbing effect of school science.

More than 225 placebo-controlled Type 1 investigations demonstrate that psychostimulants—a group of ethylamines including methylphenidate and amphetamine—are highly effective in reducing core symptoms of childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in preschoolers, school-age children, adolescents, and adults. Approximately 70% of patients respond to these medications in double-blind trials compared with 13% assigned to placebo. Short-term efficacy is more pronounced for behavioral rather than cognitive and learning abnormalities associated with ADHD. The stimulant treatment evidence base has been supplemented by two large multisite randomized controlled trials (RCTs)—the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD (MTA Study) and the Preschool ADHD Treatment Study (PATS)—that further support the short-term efficacy in young children. This study, plus the 1998 NIH Consensus Development Conference on ADHD, and the publication of the McMaster Evidence Based Review of ADHD Treatments (Jahad et al., 1999) emphasized the large evidence base supporting the efficacy of stimulant treatments. These medications are now available in long-duration preparations that allow for once-daily oral dosing, and they may even be sprinkled on food to accommodate children who cannot swallow pills. RCTs conducted more recently than 1998 continue to report a few key adverse events associated with stimulants—insomnia, decreased appetite, stomachache, and headache—but have not supported rarer and unexpected problems, such as visual hallucinations, cardiovascular accidents, or sudden unexpected death, reported anecdotally in the Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Report System (AERS) MedWatch. Although these ADHD medications have been shown to retain their efficacy for as long as 14 months, concern remains that the long-term academic and social benefits have not yet been adequately assessed. Other nonstimulant agents for which there is limited evidence of efficacy include atomoxetine, modafinil, the tricyclics, bupropion, clonidine, and venlafaxine.

Various experimental techniques are used in child language studies to research the development of coherent and cohesive narrative. The most common of them are the elicitation narrative tasks based on a series of pictures or on a video, for example, a cartoon. However, the comparison of the studies carried out using different methods shows the results that can both coincide and significantly diverge. Among the factors that influence the basic narrative characteristics of elicited child stories are age, the type of visual stimulus, its length, and the way the narrative is produced (online vs. subsequent mode). The following basic characteristics are considered to study the structure of narratives: opening and closing markers, details and separateness of the narration, the variety of characters and the presence (absence) of evaluation. The question whether the type of visual stimulus has a significant effect on the basic characteristics of children’s narratives and whether it is possible to construct a general description of the development of narrative skills regardless of the experimental task chosen by the researchers is discussed with a comparative analysis of oral narratives collected within two series of experiments with Russian native monolingual children of the senior preschool and primary school age. The analysis showed that although it is possible to reveal some tendencies inherent in the narratives collected with different experimental methods, the type of visual stimulus does not have any statistically significant effect on the basic characteristics of the narratives of primary schoolchildren. Only the differences in evaluation and closing markers in the narratives of older preschoolers, elicited either simultaneously with watching the cartoon or during its subsequent retelling, are statistically significant. Refs 37.

Статья посвящена изучению различных компонентов психологической готовности к обучению в школе детей старшего дошкольного возраста. Выявлены особенности школьной готовности у нормотипичных детей и детей с нарушениями речи. The article is devoted to the study of various components of psychological readiness for school education of children of senior preschool age. The features of school readiness in normotypic children and children with speech disorders were revealed.

Children's gender perceptions are actively formed in preschool age and are an integral component of person's gender identity. The formation of sexual identity of a child continues from 2 to 7 years, and the formation of his/her imagination occurs in the process of socialization through: identification, imitation, following, modeling, direction, self-determination, encouragement, self-acceptance, self-reflection, cognitive dissonance. Child masters the social norms, patterns of behavior and cultural values of his/her nation. The gender approach to the upbringing of the preschool children should be focused on the formation and establishment of equal, gender-independent opportunities for self-realization of the individual. However as practical experience shows, the gender component and its methodological data are insufficient in terms of the content of preschool education. In preschool institutions, gender education takes place spontaneously, educators use the traditional approach to forming child's self-esteem and his stereotypes of self-perception only on the basis of gender, so it is important today to pay more attention to gender education and socialization. Experimentally it has been investigated the peculiarities of gender and age identification of the preschoolers of the preschool institution of a combined type #9 of the city of Chernivtsi. According to the research, the greater part of children of 5-6 years old are aware of their belonging to the male or female sex, having the already formed gender identity. Gender perceptions of preschool children are gender-appropriate: girls’ - feminine, and boys’ – masculine. In addition, they are stereotypical: boys have instrumental role, girls-expressive.

The school-family-community partnership (SFC) is given by the collaborative relationships between school staff and families, community members, organizations (companies, church, libraries, social services) to implement programs and activities to help students succeed in graduation. successful studies. The clearer operationalization of the concepts of parental involvement and participation allows the differentiation of the following aspects: - two types of parental involvement, namely spontaneous (starts from the bottom up) versus planned (from the top down); the latter refers to interventions or programs built in order to solve the problem of insufficient participation or absence of parents; - involvement at home - for example, a discussion at home about school activities and involvement in school - for example, parents' participation in school activities or aspects of organizing school activities: communication with the school, school-parent relationship. Trust is vital for collaboration and is a predictor of improving school results. In a world where the use of IT and communication technologies is a key feature, they represent the core element in education, involving changes in educational policies, both in setting goals and in developing strategies, providing resources and training specialists. One of the recommendations of the new education focuses on the organization of learning contents so they can use computer applications in learning, teaching and assessment processes. The present article "Integrating educational software in the activity of preschoolers" aims to demonstrate the need to use IT technologies by introducing educational software in the study process of children in kindergartens. The use of educational programs at kindergarten level proves to be an effective learning tool that causes significant changes in acquiring knowledge and changing attitude towards learning. Children prefer to gather knowledge through educational programs rather than through traditional methods and means, which contributes to creating a positive attitude towards learning and improving the quality of their results. At the same time, in order for new technologies to prove their effeciency, it is absolutely necessary for teachers to respect the instructional design of digital materials, the rules of didactic planning and the individual and age particularities of children.

The introduction of modern means in kindergarten activities offers the teacher the opportunity to initiate the child into the mysteries of the modern world in which he lives, facilitating them from the earliest age, a better understanding of its living environment. In most cases, the teacher continues a step started in preschool stage, exploiting more the informative and formative valences of new technologies and less their playful side. Our study seeks diverse ways in which the computer can be involved in activities with preschoolers and it is based on an investigation conducted on a sample of 70 teachers. This research tries to demonstrate the important place modern means have in kindergarten, contributing to the proper assimilation of information leading to the formation of basic skills necessary for the full school education. It is useful to insist on the following aspects: the dynamic role of new technologies in the development of our society, the importance of children early initiation into ICT since kindergarten, the need to reconsider the concept of teaching in the light of strategies imposed by new means. Thus, the very notion of learning acquires new dimensions, allowing the child at the same time to discover and understand the world that surrounds him. ICT seen as a means of training brings an addition and an extra dimension to learning in kindergarten. New technologies do not establish a new disciplinary field, nor substitute fundamentally practical activities, but they must be designed as means of production, communication, documentation, discovery, experimentation, simulation and practice.

The article substantiates the importance of training future teachers to use AR technologies in the educational process of preschool and primary education. Scientific sources on the problem of AR application in education are analyzed. Possibilities of using AR in work with preschoolers and junior schoolchildren are considered. Aspects of research of the problem of introduction of AR in education carried out by modern foreign and domestic scientists are defined, namely: use of AR-applications in education; introduction of 3D technologies, virtual and augmented reality in the educational process of preschool and primary school; 3D, virtual and augmented reality technologies in higher education; increase of the efficiency of learning and motivating students through the use of AR-applications on smartphones; formation of reading culture by means of augmented reality technology; prospects for the use of augmented reality within the linguistic and literary field of preschool and primary education. The authors analyzed the specifics of toys with AR-applications, interactive alphabets, coloring books, encyclopedias and art books of Ukrainian and foreign writers, which should be used in working with children of preschool and primary school age; the possibilities of books for preschool children created with the help of augmented reality technologies are demonstrated. The relevance of the use of AR for the effective education and development of preschoolers and primary school children is determined. Problems in the application of AR in the educational process of modern domestic preschool education institutions are outlined. A method of diagnostic research of the level and features of readiness of future teachers to use AR in the educational process of preschool and primary education has been developed. Criteria, indicators are defined, the levels of development of the main components of the studied readiness (motivational, cognitive, activity) are characterized. The insufficiency of its formation in future teachers in the field of preschool and primary education; inconsistency between the peculiarities of training future teachers to use AR in professional activities and modern requirements for the quality of the educational process; the need to develop and implement a holistic system of formation of the studied readiness of future teachers in the conditions of higher pedagogical education are proved. A model of forming the readiness of future teachers to use AR in the educational process of preschool and primary education has been developed.