ABSTRACT
Play activity is the intermediate step during the transitional period that takes place in a child’s development and learning between approximately 6 and 7 years of age, which promotes the development of children’s personality, motivation, thinking and understanding of the world (Hakkarainen 2009). Play may be considered from two points of view: as a spontaneous natural activity and as a culturally mediated activity. The first concept is close to a classical psychological understanding of play in childhood, as the free activity of a child’s egocentric personality (Piaget 1994). The concept refers to the cultural historical theory of development in childhood. In this framework, play, like all other activities, arises from culture and not from evolutionary and natural manifestations. Each activity can be studied from the point of view of its structure, content, and stages of development. Each activity has to be introduced by somebody else. In other words, it is not a consequence of natural impulses in the child but an external plan of actions, which have to be introduced or presented by an adult. Introduction may be involuntary or organized joint activity between children and adults (El’konin 1980; Vygotsky 1995; Bredikyte 2011, 2012; Solovieva and Quintanar 2012). The organization of joint activity between child and adult may create the zones of proximal development. The adult might include the child into the role play such that there is participation and engagement between the adult and other children in making representative actions together. This makes individual internalization of higher mental functions and symbolic actions possible. This can only happen if the content of the activity is accessible and new for a child at the same time. In order to elaborate this idea, examples are considered in which role-play activity is accessible but not new, or new without being accessible to the child.
