Cultural actions in the play of preschool children

The article is devoted to the analysis of the key mechanisms of children’s development in the play — the correlation of cultural actions and the conditions of their formation that arise in the process of children’s play. A detailed analysis of the concepts of “situation” and “normative situation” is given. According to L.S. Vygotsky, a special role in children’s play is assigned to the imaginary situation, which determines the subjective nature of children’s activity, and directs it to the development of the semantic side of actions due to the specifics of the imaginary situation. In other words, conditions are created in preschool childhood both for mastering normative action and for establishing an attitude to normative action. This is possible due to the presence of two spaces: culture and the space of an imaginary situation. Within these spaces, cultural artifacts themselves are mastered and a subjective attitude to various aspects of cultural objects is generated.