ABSTRACT
Psychological analysis of the development of play, so important for the preschool child, suffers from relative neglect in modern educational science. The development of a child's mental processes cannot be reduced to mere progressive improvement in the functioning of the sense organs or to the formation of associations. A need has arisen to analyze the kinds of play activity employed in children's institutions in the light of modern ideas about children's mental development. There is also a need to devise psychologically sound kinds of educative play that could be put to good use in preschool education. The most essential psychologically distinctive feature of the method is that the child is given a specific, definite, constructive task to carry out. He has to build a specific model and has to find the ways to do it himself, i.e., he has to find the constructive elements from which the model can be built.
