Abstract:

Play in childhood and especially in preschool age occupies an important place in a child’s life because it is named by scientists and practitioners as a child’s main and favourite activity. Play helps a child to develop many competences, cognitive skills, stimulates communication and knowing better oneself and the world. Therefore, play can be considered as the most universal method of children’s education. According to Vygotsky (1978), play is a child’s primary form of thinking – through play a child turns from thinking in movements to thinking in concepts. According to Brėdikytė and Brandišauskienė (2014), play is the thinking of a toddler. When toddlers start playing they think in movements and actions, they mostly talk not in words but in gestures. By observing children’s play we can see that to travel by plane a toddler needs more action imitating a flight and only a few words or sounds. A child waves his/her hands, spins around, buzzes, etc. Older (five-six-year old) children already think in words, they start talking more and more to each other about flying and often they do not need many actions anymore. Therefore, even in toddlers’ games the elements of metaphorical thinking manifest themselves. According to the scientists (Fein, 1979; Lakoff & Johnson, 2003; Šragina, 1997, 1999; Malinauskienė, 2011; Gansen, 2010), who investigate metaphors, metaphorical abilities, processes of metaphorization as a cognitive activity, metaphorical thinking can be understood as a child’s ability to distinguish essential features and transfer them according to similarity from one object to another, ability to move from concrete to abstract, from images to concepts, from imagination to thinking in concepts.

The aim is to investigate the possibilities of the expression of the metaphorical thinking of preschool-age children applying games.
Methodology: 50 preschool education pedagogues from various preschool institutions of Lithuania participated in the research, they observed and assessed the behaviour and speech of 5-6-year old children during their free and creative role play, after that they filled in the prepared questionnaire. Children could freely choose the objects and environment of play to enjoy it, create the plots and roles of the game themselves.

Research methods:
Analysis of scientific, methodical literature. For data collection, processing and evaluation the combination of quantitative and qualitative research has been used: the method of questionnaire survey has been used, absolute and relative values have been calculated.

Results:
The analysis of scientific literature and the results of the research allow stating that play in preschool age plays an important role in the processes of children’s versatile development. Children’s ability to think metaphorically develops gradually, in the most elementary forms and at first manifests itself in children’s play.
Children’s metaphorical thinking has been revealed to the greatest extent in creative role plays and free plays where children, while getting new experience, relate it to what is familiar to them and to what is still unfamiliar to them.

Keywords:

Preschool-age child, play, metaphorical thinking.