Abstract:

Play is the way children reflect their social and cognitive experience. Through play they develop the ability to build relationships with others. As children best engage in play, it creates opportunities for cooperation between them in the play interactions. The skills of children to build more complex play reflect their ability to develop a range of key competencies that help them to do well in life. These skills are not a given, but develop throughout the whole preschool period. This raises the question of the organization of pedagogical interaction that stimulates the development of the social play in its more sophisticated forms.

The present study is focused on developing social play skills within preschool children aged 5-7 years. The purpose of the research is to trace the progression of the social play to its more complex stages of development after application of a series of pedagogical techniques in the organization of play. In order to achieve the goal of the study several tasks were formulated:
1. To determine the stage of development of the social play before the formative work.
2. To apply a series of pedagogical techniques that develop specific skills necessary for the social play development.
3. To make a control diagnostic of the social play stage of development in order to establish the effectiveness of the techniques application.

To collect data for the purpose of the study we used the following methods: pedagogical observation; pedagogical experiment - ascertaining, forming, control. The instrument we use to assess the stages of play is the Social Play Continuum (by P. Broadhead).

The intervention was conducted in preschools located in Bulgaria - 45 children aged 6-7 years took part in the experiment. The formative work was carried out at the moment of play organization and aimed to determine the social play stage of development before and after the application of the pedagogical techniques and their affect on play progression. To trace the dynamics of the changing complexity of the social play, were made observations on children's independent play for a period for 6 weeks. The results of the monitoring showed that after conducting the formative experiment the children's social play progressed to its more complex stages of development. The actions and interactions that children perform predominate in the field of social cooperatives, which is at a high stage in the play development. Therefore, it was concluded that it is necessary for preschool teachers to provide guidance in the organization of play activities to stimulate children's play skills. This in turn will support the application of these skills in independent play activities and will also lead to the development of more complex play forms.

Keywords:

social play, play development, preschool, early childhood education.