Developmental activities for children according to B.P. Nikitina

Boris Pavlovich and Lena Alekseevna Nikitin are called by many classics of Russian pedagogy. Using the example of their own large family back in Soviet times, they demonstrated how, by breaking established stereotypes in upbringing, they could help a child turn into an independent, harmoniously developed personality.

People first started talking about the Nikitin family in the late 50s of the 20th century. The village of Bolshevo near Moscow, where the teachers lived, was shocked by the way the young couple raised their children. The local community was surprised by the fact that the Nikitin children, who ran barefoot in the snow and were able to perform dizzying gymnastic exercises, were simply bursting with health and amazed with their intelligence. By the age of three or four, these kids had already mastered reading and the basics of mathematics, enthusiastically played logic games invented by their father, and as soon as they started school, they skipped grades.

It was then, in the 1960-1970s, that the Nikitins laid the foundations of Russian parental pedagogy, which are still used today.

Physical development of a child according to Nikitin

Childbirth: what needs to be done
All doctors, psychologists, teachers express a common opinion - the health of the child largely depends on how the birth went. Lena and Boris Nikitin, parents of seven children, wrote a book: “A request to the doctors and nurses of the maternity hospital,” the contents of which are still relevant for many maternity hospitals.

Let's consider the key points of the Nikitins' book:

1. Lack of anesthesia during childbirth. The fact is that anesthesia is harmful for a woman in labor, and even more harmful for a newborn child. Anesthesia cannot drown out the pain of labor. Childbirth, if possible, if there is no pathology, should take place naturally.
2. The umbilical cord should not be clamped or cut immediately after birth. As long as the umbilical cord transmits blood to the baby, he should receive it. In order to restore strength after childbirth and not develop hypoxia.
3. As soon as the baby is born, put him to the breast . The umbilical cord has not yet been cut. Sucking and closeness to the mother will calm the baby and give him a feeling of protection. For the mother, this is also beneficial and natural, since feeding the baby provokes contraction of the uterus, the release of blood accumulated in it after childbirth. And, most importantly, it stimulates the formation of breast milk.
4. After childbirth, a newborn child should not be separated from its mother . Mother and baby should have a warm relationship, affection, unconditional love, which is necessary for every person throughout life. And this family attachment begins from the first days spent with mother.
5. Feeding at the baby's first request. You should not impose your feeding regime on your child. If he wants to eat, let him suckle, even at night. All living things on earth have no feeding regimes. A calm and well-fed child is healthy development.
6. Do not keep your baby in diapers all the time . Tight swaddling prevents the baby from moving freely. The world around him should awaken interest and curiosity in him, which will form educational motivation in the future.
7. Strengthen the child from birth. Air and sun baths, water procedures should begin from the moment of birth.

Basic principles of the Nikitin method

• The beginning of the development of all functions and abilities, starting from the embryo.
• Minimal intervention in the process of pregnancy and childbirth: no anesthesia;
• no ligation of the umbilical cord until the end of the pulsation;
• feeding from the first minutes of life until the appearance of the first tooth, there is no sterility from birth;
• presence of the father at the birth;
• no vaccinations, instillations, lubrication;
• freedom of movement from the first minutes.

Hardening children according to the Nikitins' method

Basic principles of hardening according to the Nikitin method:

• The first physical training begins in utero. During a normal pregnancy, the mother should actively move and engage in physical exercises.

• Children should not be overwrapped or overheated . Try to wear only light clothing while awake. Especially in the warm season: a T-shirt and shorts are enough.
• The room temperature should be no more than 18 degrees . This allows you to keep the child’s body in good shape, which is also a kind of exercise.
• Early air baths. Newborn children in the Nikitin family took air baths every day. And when the child was two months old, the child was taken out into the cold for a few seconds every day. I must say that the children really liked these procedures and in the future they never got sick!
• Dipping a child in cold water from the first days of life . Nikitins advise immersing a newborn baby in cold water with his head. This triggers a very important mechanism of thermoregulation of the body.
• Walk barefoot more. Cold feet of a child are normal! The child should walk barefoot all day and only before going to bed should the feet be washed and warmed up so that the child can relax and fall asleep.
• Physical exercise . The Nikitins recommend that parents do simple physical exercises with their newborn children. Especially those that reinforce unconditioned reflexes. For older children, the Nikitins developed a system of sports corners and equipment.
• Food restriction . The Nikitins are convinced that excessive overeating of a child is more harmful than mild hunger. Don't overfeed your children and they will always have an excellent appetite.
• Lack of daily routine . The Nikitins believe that the regime overtires the baby. The more “obligations”, the less interest. Children should exercise as much as they want, often changing between active (physical) and sedentary (intellectual) activities.
• Freedom to move . As soon as the child begins to crawl, give him complete freedom of movement. But for this you will have to prepare the apartment (secure it). Strollers, walkers, jumpers and playpens are prohibited! Allow your child to play with more than just toys. Introduce your baby to kitchen items, tools, and appliances.
• Combating a sterile environment. There is no need to isolate children from the world. They need information! Let them crawl, touch and even put in their mouth. This knowledge is irreplaceable. Your task is to clean, within reason, if you have a small child at home.

Who were the authors?

Boris and Lena Nikitin are mom and dad from a large family. They both had pedagogical education. The idea of ​​raising children according to a new system was hatched by Boris Pavlovich when he was at a young age and worked in the aviation industry. He dreamed of creating his own school, where the younger generation would not be educated according to the hackneyed methods of the Soviet space.

Lena Alekseevna Nikitina, after meeting the most wonderful man, according to her, her husband Boris, gave birth to seven children. Together they decided to introduce a new parenting method into their family. They created an atmosphere of creativity in their home and actively raised and educated their children.

Gradually it was enriched with hypotheses, evidence of the correctness of the theory, and new methods. There were trials and errors, but the result was – education according to the new scheme gives positive results.

For residents of a village near Moscow, where a large family lived, it was strange to observe the method of raising Nikitin children. They couldn’t imagine how they could let a child run barefoot in the snow, and the gymnastic exercises that their children easily performed were a fascinating sight for them. Starting from the age of three, the children from the Nikitin family already learned to read and easily counted to ten.

Agree, such results in the late 50s of the twentieth century surprised anyone.

Yes, the Nikitins found the courage to resist the education system of those times, and today their method or its elements are popular among young parents. “Raising a child cannot be the same for everyone and according to certain programs,” said Boris Nikitin, “every child is an individual, and the task of parents is to encourage his activity” - the basic principles of raising children.

Nikitin's intellectual games

“Tell me and I will forget.
Show me and I will remember.

Let me do it myself and I’ll understand.”

Nikitin developed educational games for children of any age. They develop a child’s attention, logic, memory, imagination, creativity, patience and perseverance. For a child to understand how to play, a parent needs a personal example, and then the child plays on his own, without anyone else’s participation.

Features of Nikitin's intellectual games:

1. Nikitin's educational games include various puzzles, cubes, construction sets, tables and logical tasks.
2. The tasks have different levels of difficulty, both for young children and for high school students.
3. You need to play mind games from simple to complex.
4. The tasks the child performs are presented in the form of visual teaching material. The correctness of the solution can be verified visually.
5. You cannot demand that a child solve this or that problem. The desire of the child himself is primary.
6. Almost all of Nikitin’s games assume that you can come up with your own problems and solutions to them.
7. An adult should not tell a child. He must think for himself.
8. Parents should praise their child for successfully completed tasks, motivating them to continue playing with games.
9. If your child gets tired, end the lesson immediately. It’s better to stop on a good note so that the desire to play arises again.

Boris Nikitin described his educational games in the book “Intellectual Games”. Many of Nikitin's intellectual games aids can be made with your own hands. Or you can buy ready-made Nikitin games and manuals.

Description of developmental tasks

All educational games B.P. Nikitin can be purchased on the family selling website, as well as in stores. You can start getting acquainted with educational games with Nikitin's cut square. The game is called "Fold the Square".

Collecting Nikitin's square will be interesting for the whole family, as the game evokes real sports excitement.
It seems that no one will be able to put together a figure, but the despair that arises in the process of a family competition gives hope of victory and forces one to achieve the goal. The game is more intended for preschoolers and is designed to develop:

• ability to think logically;
• the ability to analyze the conditions of a problem and logically come to the right solution;
• skill of a creative approach to implementation;
• idea of ​​geometric space;
• color perception.

The set contains 36 squares of different colors. One is a sample, the rest are cut in various ways from simple to complex. Goal: make squares from individual parts.

One of the kids’ favorite games is “Fold the Pattern”. Children are interested in how individual cubes create a wonderful pattern. You can play from the age of two. Babies develop:

• visual thinking;
• color perception;
• ability to compare and combine;
• visual memory;
• self-control;
• attention and perseverance;
• imagination.

The game set includes 16 wooden cubes of the same size with edges painted in different colors, as well as tasks. The child plays with blocks and at the same time makes a beautiful pattern. The little ones can use the app for the game - an album where the pictures are enlarged, and each task is located on its own page.

The game “Unicube” can be played by children from 3-4 years old, but it also gives a lot of joy to older children, and dads are simply crazy about it. It will appeal to everyone who wants to test their ingenuity and intelligence. The box contains 27 cubes, which are painted in only three colors: yellow, blue and red. The instructions contain 60 puzzle tasks.

The work begins with collecting the model, focusing only on external similarity in color.

Then the task becomes more complicated: now the baby must see the internal contents of the model. The most difficult task is to place the cube, taking into account all six sides.

Game "Fold the pattern"

The set contains 16 cubes with multi-colored edges. The game develops basic math skills. You can start playing it as early as 1.5 years old.

1. Look at the cubes with your child, learn the colors, count their number. This game is for the little ones.
2. Show your child that you can build paths from blocks. Wait until the child wants to make the path himself. First, a path of one color (yellow for the “bunny”, and red for the “bunny”). At the same time, we pronounce and fix the name of the color.
3. When the child learns to build one-color paths, show how to build multi-colored ones. Here you can study the pattern and sequence: “Look at my path. What did you notice? - Yes, the cubes are blue, yellow, blue, yellow, and which one is next? Continue the path. If you want, come up with your own colorful path for your little fox.”
4. After these games, it's time to make patterns from the cubes. First, like my mother’s, then like Nikitin’s manual. Later you can come up with patterns yourself.

Game "Fold the square"

This game consists of colorful squares cut into pieces of different shapes.

This game has three difficulty levels.

When playing with your child, do not forget to name the shapes that make up the squares: triangle, trapezoid, etc. You can count how many angles and sides there are. Also called the color of the figure. Pay attention to the child that, for example, triangles come in different sizes and shapes. Here you can also introduce the concepts of “whole” and “part”.

The game develops imagination, logical thinking, fine motor skills, as well as imagination and combinatorial abilities of children.

Frames and inserts

This game is accessible to the little ones. It consists of 16 frames with inserts in the form of geometric shapes: circle, square, triangle, ellipse (oval), rectangle and so on. A better place to start is by showing the inserts. Take a circle, an oval, a square, an equilateral triangle and, naming them, show them to the baby. In this case, it is better not to hold them in your hands, but to lay them out on a plain surface (not on a colored tablecloth or carpet, but at least on a sheet of paper). Having shown one figure at a time, you can give them to the baby for independent actions - let him look at them and play. It would be appropriate to offer him a box or jar in which he can put all this and then pour it back. Gradually, the little one will get to know all 16 figures in the set. If you start with a small number of figures, you can attract the baby to play starting from 10-12 months. When the child grows up, you can complicate the tasks: trace the outlines of the figures with a pencil, first along the frames, then along the inserts (this is more difficult), make a double outline, shade the resulting image, draw figures on the count (three circles, two squares), create plot drawings ( herringbone of three isosceles triangles).

Game "Fractions"

The game consists of three plywood boards with 4 circles each. They are all the same in size, but different in color. The first circle is solid, the second is divided into two identical parts, the third into three parts, and so on, up to 12 parts.

First, the first plywood with four circles is introduced into the game. The first thing you can do is say the colors, count the pieces, and compare their sizes.

What to do next with this?

1. Invite the child to put pieces of the same color into separate piles.
2. Ask the child to make circles of the same color from the resulting piles.
3. Explain to the child how the names of one part of the circles are obtained (1/2, 1/3, ¼, 1/5, etc.)
4. Play the game: put one piece of different color in a row in ascending order.
5. Invite your child to experimentally find out which part is greater than 1/3 or ½. How can this be checked?
6. Ask: How many quarters fit on one half? What about sixth parts? Eighth?
7. What parts will fit into 1/3?
8. How to make a whole circle (two-color, three-color, etc.) from parts of different colors?
9. How many whole multi-colored circles can you add together? Etc.

Educational games in individual work with children with speech disorders

Educational games in individual work with children with speech disorders.

“Without play there is not and cannot be full-fledged mental development. A game is a huge bright window through which a life-giving stream of ideas and concepts flows into the child’s spiritual world. Play is the spark that ignites the flame of inquisitiveness and curiosity.” V.A. Sukhomlinsky.

In light of the implementation of the Federal State Educational Standard for Education, teachers of preschool educational institutions are faced with the task of cognitive development of preschool children. Cognitive development involves the development of children's interests, curiosity and motivation, the formation of cognitive actions, the formation of consciousness, the development of imagination and creative activity, the formation of primary ideas about oneself, other people, objects of the surrounding world, the properties and relationships of objects of the surrounding world (shape, color, size , quantity, part and whole, space, etc.).

A modern teacher should set as his goal the education of a preschool child - creatively developed, proactive, liberated, with a high level of development of cognitive abilities.

Working with children with speech impairments, you understand that overcoming speech impairments is directly related to the child’s mental development. Therefore, in my work I set not only the task of forming clear and correct speech in children, but also the development of cognitive activity in children with speech disorders.

This is possible when using educational games when working with children with speech pathology. We are accustomed to thinking that with the help of educational games we develop mental processes: attention, memory, thinking (from visual-actional (cognition through the manipulation of objects), to verbal-logical (cognition using concepts, words, reasoning), perception. And this undeniable. But if you look at these games differently, you understand that they are an indisputable assistant to the teacher in the development of the speech system as a whole.

We took as a basis the games created and developed by the spouses B.P. Nikitin and E.A. Nikitina.

These games have been produced for more than 25 years in Russia, Germany, Japan and other countries, called “Nikitinsky material” or “Nikitin games”. They are played in families, kindergartens and schools, and are even used as rehabilitation material in nursing homes. Various methods, styles, approaches to these games are being developed - even special training manuals, no longer written by the Nikitins.

Games developed by B.P. Nikitin, there are a lot of “Fold the Pattern”, “Unicube”, “Cubes for Everyone” and “Bricks” - the most famous “intellectual games” of the Nikitins. But there are others: “Table of Hundreds”, “Table of Pythagoras”, “Fractions”, “Plan and Map”, “Clock”, “Thermometer”, “Knots”. Yes, these are games, but unusual games. As their author, Boris Pavlovich Nikitin, wrote: “You can’t just give them to a child like a toy and say: “Play!” - the game may not work.

They cannot be shown to the child all at once, but only one at a time; and the next one, perhaps not earlier than in a week or even a month... They have an unusually wide range of tasks - both in difficulty and in variety of character, so a preschooler, a student, and a student can get carried away with them. You can play them alone, or together, with the whole family, or with a company, or with a whole group in kindergarten or a class in elementary school, and even hold an Olympics for the championship... They can be called a sports complex, but... for the mind, for the development of creative child's abilities.

Having studied the literature on this topic, I came to the conclusion that all Nikitin’s educational games have the following characteristic features :

1. Each Nikitin game is a set of problems that the child solves with the help of cubes, bricks, squares made of wood or plastic, parts of a mechanical designer, etc.
2. Tasks are given to the child in various forms: in the form of a model, a flat drawing, an isometric drawing, a drawing, written or oral instructions, that is, in the form of visible and tangible things and thus introduce him to different ways of transmitting information. They also allow you to compare a visual “task” with a “solution” and check for yourself the accuracy of the task.
3. The tasks are arranged approximately in order of increasing difficulty, i.e. they use the principle of folk games: from simple to complex. They have a very wide range of difficulties: from those that are sometimes accessible to a 2-3-year-old child to those that are beyond the capabilities of the average adult. Therefore, Nikitin’s games and cubes can arouse interest for many years (until adulthood).
4. They promote the development of independence and creative abilities by offering the child a task; you cannot demand and ensure that the child solves the problem on the first try. It may not have grown or matured yet, and you need to wait a day, a week, a month or even more.
5. Nikitin's cubes allow everyone to rise to the “ceiling” of their capabilities, where development is most successful.

In Nikitin’s educational games, he managed to combine one of the basic principles of learning “from simple to complex” with a very important principle of creative activity – “independently according to one’s abilities.”

This union allows you to solve several problems related to the development of creative abilities:

1. Nikitin's games can stimulate the development of creative abilities from a very early age,
2. Tasks-steps of Nikitin’s games always create conditions that advance the development of abilities,
3. A child develops most successfully if every time he independently tries to solve the most difficult problems for him,
4. Nikitin's games can be very diverse in their content and, moreover, like any games, they do not tolerate coercion and create an atmosphere of free and joyful creativity,
5. By playing Nikitin’s games with their children, mothers and fathers, unnoticed by themselves, acquire a very important skill - to restrain themselves, not to interfere with the child’s thinking and making decisions, not to do for him what he can and should do himself.

Thus, these educational games meet all five basic conditions for the development of children’s abilities.

The significance of these games prompted me to introduce and use Nikitina’s educational games in my work with children with speech impairments.

I got acquainted with Nikitin’s educational games and chose the educational game “Fold the Pattern” developed by Boris Pavlovich and Lena Alekseevna Nikitin. According to the authors, the educational game “Fold the Pattern” can rather be called not a game, but a gaming aid that creates a “developmental environment” for the child.

An analysis of the principles underlying educational games and the principles of correctional and developmental work allowed me to highlight the general principles of the upbringing and development of children with speech disorders:

• Reliance on the leading activity of preschool age - play;
• From simple to complex, gradual complication of the learning task and game conditions;
• Taking into account the zone of proximal development, based on the child’s abilities and capabilities;
• Organic connection and relationship between the external and internal (mental) activity of the child and a gradual transition to more intense mental work;
• Combining elements of play and learning in a child’s activity and a gradual transition from games to educational and cognitive activity;
• Increasing the child’s mental activity in solving proposed problems;
• Unity of educational, training and development goals.

At the initial stage, I introduced children to the game “Fold the Pattern” in individual lessons. The children looked at the cubes, named the colors, counted how many cubes were in the box, and laid out the cubes when asked.

If the child coped with the proposed task, we moved on to the next one. The children enthusiastically accepted the educational game “Fold the Pattern”. If difficulties arose in solving any task, we left it and returned to it another time, and so on until the child completed the proposed task. Children were also encouraged to take the game home for the weekend and play at home with their parents. Parents really liked the game and many of them purchased it for personal use. This served as an additional incentive for preschoolers and allowed them to achieve better results in working with children.

The use of this educational game in individual work with children, as a teacher-speech therapist, allowed me to solve the following problems :

1. To ensure psychological comfort and development of the emotional-volitional sphere of children during individual lessons.
2. Teach children to navigate on a plane.
3. Form and develop techniques of mental action (analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, classification, analogy). Games “Continue the path”, “Which pebble will be next”, “Finish the garland for the Christmas tree”, “Change Parsley”, “Build a slide for the animals”. “Guess the riddle and post the answer” (before working with the game, ask a riddle, and the child lays out the answer and explains what helped him solve the riddle.
4. Develop higher mental functions (memory, attention, thinking), constructive abilities: “Grow the same Christmas tree,” “Build the same flag,” “Lay out a fence from memory.” If there are errors, carefully compare the pattern instructions and what you got. When examining the pattern, the child’s attention is drawn to how many squares and triangles the pattern consists of, what color the cubes are in the pattern, can be compared with the previous pattern, how it is similar, how it is different.
5. Clarify ideas about the spatial characteristics of surrounding objects. When examining a pattern: the shape of objects, the number of elements of which they consist, the color of objects, their size, height, length, width are fixed. The skills of recognizing, comparing, grouping objects, isolating a part from a whole, composing a whole from parts, understanding the comparative degrees of adjectives (big - small, high - low, long - short, wide - narrow), and understanding simple prepositional constructions are developed. The principle of gradual complication of the material is observed. Games “Compare the tracks”, (whose track is longer and whose is shorter, how many cubes are needed for the first track, the second), “Whose house is the tower higher.”
6. Teach children to determine the spatial position of objects relative to each other, their position relative to other objects (in front of which cube, under which cube, to the left/right of the cube).
7. Develop fine motor skills and speech activity.
8. Practice grammatical categories: agreement of numerals with nouns, agreement of numerals, adjectives and nouns; the use of nouns in the plural and singular, nominative and genitive cases. Games “Count how many cubes are blue, red, yellow or white”, “How many cubes/what color is the fence or path built from”, “How many cubes have we selected to build a house?”.

By the end of the year, all children (5-6 years old) in the compensatory group for children with SLI had developed mental action techniques (analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization, classification), preschoolers learned to navigate on a plane, determine the spatial position of objects relative to each other (in front of which cube, under which cube, to the left/right of the cube), the use of this game made it possible to qualitatively improve such higher mental functions as (memory, attention, thinking, perception) and constructive abilities.

The use of the educational game “Fold the Pattern” also had a positive effect on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the vocabulary, the grammatical structure of speech and the syllabic structure of words in children.

In play, different aspects of personality are revealed and developed, many intellectual and emotional needs are satisfied, and the child’s character is formed.

As a result of using the developmental game “Fold the Pattern” in individual work, I created conditions that contributed to the formation of initial forms of self-esteem and self-control in children, which is of great importance for their future educational activities, as well as for a full life in a group of peers.

Do you think that you are just buying a toy? No, you are designing a human personality! B.P.Nikitin

Marchenko T.V., teacher-speech therapist

1. Relationships in the work of a speech therapist, educators and health workers in the implementation of health-saving technologies with children with severe speech impairments
2. Professional training of speech therapists for the use of computer technologies in working with children with speech disorders
3. Working on vocabulary words in speech therapy classes with children suffering from written speech disorders
4. Development of speech and fine motor skills during art classes with children with severe speech impairments
5. Using the fundamentals of ecological culture in corrective direct educational activities with children with disabilities (with severe speech impairments)

( 3 liked, average score: 5.00 out of 5)

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Game "Cubes for everyone"

The game develops spatial thinking abilities, helps to master graphic literacy, and understand drawings before school.
You begin your classes by showing your child a drawing task and asking them to build a model of the drawing using cubes. Having successfully constructed one, move on to the next more complex drawing.

The child needs to choose the right ones from all the figures and place them correctly in the model.

Creative work begins when the child comes up with his own models and uses them to draw a drawing task for adults.

Nikitin's basic pedagogical principles

• The earliest possible beginning of a child’s development, starting in utero.
• Maximum diversified development of the sensory and musculoskeletal systems of the body.
• Thorough development of developmental techniques and incentives before use.
• Creating a varied environment for activities from the birth of the child (taking into account passion).
• Work for the highest final result in the development of the child: physical parameters - to record levels, mental parameters - without limits.
• Complete freedom and independence of children in everything.
• Adults' interest in all children's affairs.

Game "Unicube"

These universal blocks are for children from 2 to 15 years old. They develop spatial thinking, teach clarity, attentiveness, precision, accuracy.

All 27 cubes are different, although only three colors are used to color them. First, parents ask the child to find a cube with two sides of the same color. Then build a “tower”, “house”, “ladder”.

The tasks in Unicube are difficult; you cannot give too many of them at once. Most often, one task is enough, less often two or three, depending on the child’s abilities.

Children are given tasks either through drawings or orally. It is necessary to gradually lead the child to understand tasks well both orally and in the form of drawings.

All mental and construction work should be carried out by the child independently, without adult intervention. The adult’s task is to rejoice at the successful completion of the task and praise the child for his efforts. If you fail, you are upset, but you believe that tomorrow or in a week the child will definitely succeed.

Attitude to children's health

Nikitin believed that children are capable of solving all the problems associated with them by nature (natural upbringing). Through experience, parents have developed a rule regarding their attitude towards children’s health:

• take medical recommendations as informative;
• take as a basis the results of observations of the child, his well-being, reactions;
• keep a diary of observations;
• monitor children’s physical development indicators using their own tests;
• in case of problems, supplement observations with knowledge from different sources until the essence of the problem and its solution are fully understood.

They believed that health would be good only when the child’s physical abilities were developed.

How to play Nikitin's games

And in conclusion - a few general rules for all Nikitin’s intellectual games.

1. Games should not be freely available to the child; take them out only when the baby is in the mood and wants to play them.
2. Don’t be upset if your child fails to complete the task the first time - perhaps he is not yet mature enough and will succeed later.
3. The child should retain the feeling of being “underplayed” and not “overplayed,” so finish the game before he gets tired.
4. Get creative with your games. Together with your children, come up with new types of patterns, drawings, and game options.
5. An adult should not perform a task for a child, point out mistakes or give hints. You can only push the child and help him find the right solution on his own.

Basic principles of education “in Nikitin’s way”

According to the Nikitins, adults traditionally allow two extremes when communicating with a child. The first is being organized. That is, super-caring care and continuous activities, entertainment, games. The child has no time for independent activities.

The second extreme is the abandonment of the child. This means that communication with the baby comes down only to serving him (feeding, drinking, putting him to sleep). This approach leads to deprivation (psychological starvation), hospitalism (delayed emotional and mental development) and, ultimately, mental retardation.

The Nikitin system is based, first of all, on labor, naturalness, closeness to nature and creativity. The guys are masters of themselves, their actions and routine. Parents do not force them to do anything; they only help them understand complex life and philosophical problems. Adults push, rather than get ahead of children, and enter into dialogue with them. The main task of education, according to the Nikitins, is the maximum development of the creative abilities of a growing person and his preparation for life.

The authors define the basic principles of their method as follows.

Firstly, freedom of creativity for children in their classes. No special training, exercises, lessons. Children exercise as much as they want, combining sports with all other activities.

Secondly, light clothing and a sports environment in the house: sports equipment is part of the daily life of children from early childhood, becoming their natural habitat, along with furniture and other household items.

Thirdly, parental concern for what and how the kids are doing, the participation of adults in children's games, competitions, and in general - in the very lives of children.

Parents should have only one goal: not to interfere with the child’s development, but to help him, not to put pressure on children in accordance with some of their own plans, but to create conditions for their further development, focusing on the children’s well-being and desires.

Lena Alekseevna and Boris Pavlovich did not initially set themselves the goal of teaching their kids everything as early as possible. They noticed that children develop earlier those aspects of intelligence for which appropriate “advanced” conditions have been created. Let's say a child has just begun to speak, and among his toys he already has cubes with letters, a cut alphabet, plastic letters and numbers.

Pros and cons of the Nikitin methods

The “advantages” of the Nikitins’ technique are:

1. The child develops well physically, gets sick little, and is hardened.
2. A child early learns to think logically: to generalize, highlight the main properties, draw conclusions and apply them in practice. Able to apply acquired knowledge in further games.
3. Development of visual, auditory, motor memory;
4. Development of interest, curiosity and learning motivation;
5. Development of independence;
6. Development of creativity, creative imagination
7. The technique well prepares the basis for the study of exact sciences.

«Disadvantages of the Nikitins’ technique:

1. The Nikitins' method needs to be supplemented with other developmental programs, since it does not contain games that teach reading or preparation for writing.
2. Hardening methods are considered too radical; not all parents will follow this example. It will be necessary to obtain recommendations from a pediatrician.
3. Not everyone will like the spartan living conditions and malnutrition.
4. The Nikitins in their education system do not provide for children's role-playing games at all. The Nikitins’ child should not play with cars, dolls, shops, “war games” and “mothers and daughters”. From early childhood he must be accustomed to work and self-service. Must be able to manage a household. But he just doesn’t know how to play.

If the Nikitins’ methodology is perceived as a good tool for the development of a child’s logic, mathematical skills, and physical development and is supplemented with other good tools for more comprehensive development, then this will be an excellent option for parents, teachers and psychologists. This is what Elena Danilova describes in her book “A New Look at the Nikitins’ Games.” It complements and enriches the tasks for Nikitin’s games and helps parents look at his games a little differently.

Bottom line

1. The methodology is an educational system, and not just a set of exercises.
2. Sometimes she is humanistic and the child is an individual with his own feelings. Sometimes she can be cruel, for the sake of the future good (later the Nikitins realized this and softened their methods).
3. An independent person is created from a child. It also encourages curiosity. The child independently explores the world, and does not simply assimilate what the adult says or shows.
4. Health and physical activity are important.
5. There is practically no artistic side of development in the methodology.

Progressio’s development principles largely overlap with the Nikitins’ methodology, smoothing out all the controversial aspects for which it is criticized.

To what extent does the Nikitin methodology correspond to modern child development, within the framework of “21st Century Skills”?