FORMING NATURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL COMPETENCE OF CHILDREN OF SENIOR PRESCHOOL AGE

The article considers the role of natural and environmental competence of senior preschool children. The theoretical analysis of scientific literature carried out in the course of the study allowed to clarify the concepts: ‘environmental competence’ in relation to preschool children as the ability of a child, on the basis of acquired knowledge, skills and individual experience, to solve environmental problems in accordance with their needs and opportunities that they encounter in everyday life.Based on the analysis of theoretical approaches, the article defines the essence of environmental competence formation as a holistic process aimed at forming a set of knowledge, skills, emotional and value orientations that help a person to realise the place of nature in his/her life, duty and responsibility towards nature.The purpose of the article is to theoretically substantiate and experimentally determine the levels of natural and environmental competence of senior preschool children. In the course of the study, it was found that the formation of environmental competence of an individual is a complex and long-term process that has its own structure (cognitive, value, motivational, emotional and volitional, behavioural and activity components).Based on the results of the theoretical analysis of a significant array of scientific and methodological sources, advanced pedagogical experience, we have defined the essence of the concept of ‘natural and environmental competence of the senior preschool child’, identified the components of its internal structure, defined the criteria, indicators and levels of formation of this personal phenomenon. In the structure of this competence, the cognitive, emotional, value and activity components are identified, which are identified by the following criteria: cognitive, axiological, emotional and behavioural. The degree of manifestation of indicators for each of these criteria allows us to judge the level of formation of the criterion of natural and environmental competence, and on the basis of the totality of manifestations of the criteria to identify and describe the levels of competence formation. Three levels of senior preschool children's natural and environmental competence were identified: high, medium and low, the identification and characteristics of which became possible due to the diagnosis of children's knowledge and ideas about nature, the role of man in it, the study of emotional experiences, observation of children's behaviour in the environment and their play activities. The experimental study was implemented in three stages: after theoretical generalisations of scientific data on the natural and environmental competence of senior preschool children and the choice of diagnostic tools to identify criteria, indicators and levels of formation of the studied phenomenon, a confirmatory experiment was conducted, which allowed to judge the state of forming the natural and environmental competence of preschool children.