N.A. Fomina, professor, Dr.Hab.
S.Yu. Maksimova, associate professor, Dr.Hab.
Volgograd State Physical Education Academy

Keywords: preschool children, physical education of preschool children, adaptive physical education, music motor activity, plot-role rhythmic gymnastics, integration of motor and cognitive activities.

Introduction. Preschool age is a crucial stage in a person's life. It is during this period that rapid physical development, formation of functional systems and development of personal qualities take place and the foundation for health is laid. The level of preschool maturity development is a determining factor of further progress, and thus the person’s success in different activities. Therefore, the quality of preschool education, including the physical education aspect, becomes an important issue.

It is well known that at the early stages of ontogenesis, physical activity is the main factor in the child’s development. Movement is both physical and intellectual work for a child, the biological need of the body that stimulates his development. Acquisition of new types of movements depends on the formation of brain functions. Child’s motor development especially that of fine motor skills is related to speech acquisition, the development of his cognitive processes - memory, attention, thinking. Children who are physically more active are more curious which stimulates their cognitive activity.

At the same time, 3 to 7 year-olds have distinct age peculiarities that need to be taken into account in teaching practice. Game is the child’s main activity from birth to 7 years. Need for movement, play, vivid emotions is in congruity with nature, i.e. it meets the natural laws of human development at the preschool childhood stage. Any restrictions of these requirements can result in delay of the child’s physical, cognitive and verbal, social and personal, artistic and aesthetic development. According to experts, these are the main four areas and they are declared as basic ones in the Federal state educational standard of preschool education (FGOSDO, 2013).

Organization of direct educational activity in preschool physical education should be carried out with due regard of these FGOSDO provisions and ensure integration of educational areas including sociocommunicative, cognitive, verbal, artistic and aesthetic as well as physical development.

Given the modern realities of preschool education, the search for new theoretical and methodological approaches to the content and organization of recreational and developmental activities in children’s physical education is required.

Purpose of the study was to substantiate the content of music and motor activity and determine the effectiveness of the implementation on its basis of the process of physical education of preschool children, including ones with disabilities.

Materials and methods. During experimental studies (2002-2014) 2.000 children of 3-7 years of age attending mass and special preschool educational institutions of Volgograd and Togliatti were examined to determine the development of their motor abilities and mental processes that provide the child’s intellectual activity. The system models of preschool physical education [10,11] and adaptive physical education of preschool mentally retarded children [5,6] on the basis of music and motor activity were developed during the theoretical analysis. These models were implemented and tested in the integral learning process in preschool educational institutions.

Results and discussion. Long-term experimental studies have enabled us to systematize the data and develop educational systems and technologies of physical education, including the ones for children with impairments, that are incorporated in a general direction, that today we dare to define as music and motor physical education of preschool children.

A new approach to the organization and build-up of physical education in preschool educational institutions, including special institutions for children with impairments (mental retardation and speech disorders), is offered.

Music and motor activity is regarded as the leading one, which we define as the process of a preschooler’s active interaction with the physical and music culture values, aimed at psychophysical development, including intellectual one, and satisfaction of his/her natural needs for movement, play and emotional enrichment [5, 10].

Music acts as an additional factor of educational influence in this process. Due to its structure organizing and emotional-imaginative nature it strengthens the impact on the child’s mental and physical condition.

It is known that music is an all-powerful movement stimulus not only for hands, feet, body, head, but also for vocal and respiratory system muscles, as well as deep-lying muscles of chest and abdomen [4,9]. "Psychologists managed to capture these movements and find out that the person involved in rhythmic movement "echoes" the rhythm with all his musculature at once and with every part of it" [5]. The same authors argue that movement generated rhythm, and the latter in its turn generated music. Music material is always rhythmic, therefore its perception is rhythmic too. Every person, including a child, regardless of his/her condition and mood, always feels the rhythm of music, interprets and reproduces it via various motor responses.

Laws of music, according to V. Zenkovsky [3], obviously given by God, can be applied in various fields of knowledge. Sh. Amonashvili [2] supports and develops this idea in modern pedagogics. He believes that music theory is a synthesis of theoretical and artistic knowledge, and the use of its conceptual apparatus in pedagogics will serve to enrich the semantics of its concepts, more vivid perception and understanding of practical, theoretical and methodological problems of education. Derived from music, such expressions as "the art of performing pedagogical tunes", "major and minor keys of the educational process" can be found in the pedagogical works of Sh. Amonashvili [1].

When applied to pedagogics, the music and theoretical categories can serve as important research and pedagogical guidelines governing the structural and substantive aspects of the educational process [8].

In the context of our study these points of view are important methodological guidelines that enable us to talk about the possibility and feasibility of combining musical art with organized motor activity.

Music same as movement is a clear example of organizational arrangement of an infinite number of its components. A music piece combines an infinite number of sounds, they are organized in it and converted into a melody. Same with the movement composition where an infinite number of motor actions (physical exercises) is arranged and logically distributed. When these two things are combined, synthesized, the logic of exercise distribution, the nature and orientation of exercises are suggested by the structure and artistic image of the music piece. Structural characteristics of music have important organizational functions.

In the process of music and motor activities the background music enriches educational environment, so that it could significantly expand the range of educational and training objectives.

Music pieces and movement compositions (combinations) have much in common in terms of structural approach. First, they unfold in time. Second, the development of a music piece is subject to certain structural divisions into phrases, sentences, periods. Also in motor combinations/compositions you can clearly see specific exercises and sequences combined into movement connections, which in turn are joined into longer movement groups. Third, the reproduction rhythm in movements is organized by performing certain physical exercises, each of which has a perceptible accentuated effect. Similarly, in music the sound rhythm is perceived when one clearly feels the accented part of a measure. Fourth, a physical exercise as the structural unit of a motor composition has many similarities with a music measure - the structural element of music. [11]

The structure of a music piece has a significant impact on the architectonics of locomotor manifestations which must be taken into consideration when preparing the motor material for compositions. In addition, it is possible to take into account only the time relationships in music (tempo) but not all its features - melody, rhythm, meter, tempo, dynamic nuances - and to build more complete corresponding movements on this basis.

At the present stage of development in order to enhance and enrich human science with the knowledge of physical education and to solve numerous educational problems more efficiently there is a noticeable increase in the professionals’ interest in the educational potential of art.

Both theory and practice of physical education is increasingly applying to the means and methods of music, dance, theater activities. A striking example of integration of physical education with art is music and motor activity.

According to experts the feasibility of stronger convergence of physical education with music is based on the fact that these culture spheres have the same target object – a human being, and in the context of educational process - the student’s personality. Music as a special kind of knowledge becomes a particular additional educational environment that has a beneficial impact on the student.

The most important result of music and motor activity is to meet the children’s natural needs both in movement and cognition, their emotional and sensory enrichment, game.

Music with its unique imaginary and emotional content is able to penetrate the individual regardless of his consciousness and evoke an active response to it. Thus, the musical accompaniment of physical exercise can correctly and subtly stimulate the child to emotionally expressive motor activity. Through imaginary, specific art movements, facial, rhythmic and plastic expressions a child becomes emotionally liberated and enriched [1,7].

Music and motor activities organized in this way have a wealth of representational characteristics that create serious motives in a child to master them. At the same time they are stipulated by his internal needs and desires and not imposed from outside. Thanks to the content and emotional characteristics of music the motivation to motor activity can be maintained over a long period of time.

Performing exercises with the rhythmically organized musical accompaniment is associated with rich polysensory effects on the student’s body through auditory, visual, muscle and articular analyzers. Through rhythmic, emotional and imaginative features of music children learn about the character of movements, it is music what encourages them to move in a clear, conscious, beautiful, expressive way and do it for a long time. The structure of the music piece, its logically mathematical structure acts as a guide prompting the content of motor material, regulating its timing, composition ratio.

Physical exercises performed in the process of music and motor activities are at the understandable and appropriate level for children which contributes to the rapid and efficient mastering of them.

Musical pieces for children usually have a game-like subject-matter which is most clearly seen in musical fairy tales and attracts children’s attention. This fact is of special significance in the organization of motor activities for preschool children. Narrative subject-matter of music can act as a causality category of motor activity. Grasping the content of a music piece a child is able to perform a variety of physical activities on his own, without strict supervision and regulation. The story and role line in the motor activities of a musical fairy tale may serve as a stimulus for making up and implementing his own exercise program (with a specific storyline organization). This independent creative motor activity is already the result of physical education. Role-play characteristics of music and motor activity act as the cause and condition of its impact. Immersing into a role the child arbitrarily performs exercises efficiently, successfully and emotionally. As the storyline progresses the game interaction is considered to be a regulator of motor activity. Playing a role, interacting with his game partners the child consciously controls his motor behavior, makes up and analyzes his program of motor actions.

The results of numerous educational experiments (from 1992 to 2014) convince of the effectiveness and practicability of music and motor activities as a major factor in physical education of preschool children.

During this period we developed the theoretically and experimentally substantiated system of rhythmic gymnastics based on storyline role play that provides strongly pronounced integration of cognitive and motor activities of preschoolers.

Its effectiveness consisted in a significant increase in the development levels of cognitive processes and physical fitness of 3-7 year-olds. At the same time there was a predominant rise of coordination abilities, including rhythm, concordance, responsiveness, sense of balance, fine-motor coordination of the experimental group subjects as compared to their peers from the control groups.

Statistically significant differences in the manifestations of attention, memory and thinking with their higher indices in the experimental groups suggest the better development of children’s intellectual sphere in the process of music and motor activities. Older preschoolers in the experimental groups also had higher indices of self-activity - a new element of preschool age, the development of which indicates the child's readiness to learn. In the process of music and motor physical education children mastered the technique of exercise much better, their performance level was higher than that of their peers in the control group.

The systematic use of music and motor activity as a major tool in the process of adaptive physical education of mentally retarded preschoolers revealed its remedial and developmental potential, which was seen not only in the improvement of children’s physical and mental development but also in raising their psycho-physical status to that of their normally developing peers.

As seen from experimental studies in the groups of preschool children with general or phonetic-phonemic speech disorders they can be corrected in the course of music and motor activities based on speech rhythmic movements. In the experimental groups of 5-6 year-old children a more significant improvement was marked both in individual components (phonemic system, sound pronunciation, vocabulary, phrase speech) and the overall level of language development.

Thus, we can talk of the formation of a special trend in the physical education of preschool children - music and motor one that provides the integrated physical and mental development of children.

Conclusion. Thus, we can talk about the formation of music and motor direction in the preschool physical education that provides integration of motor and cognitive activity and effective motor and mental, including intellectual development of 3 to 7 year-old children.

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Corresponding author: fizkult@teoriya.ru