What is the beginning of moral and aesthetic education at the age of 1-1.5 years?

In the second year of life, children begin to develop the prerequisites for moral feelings. Therefore, it is necessary to cultivate these feelings. I have already drawn your attention several times to the fact that children try to imitate adults in everything. Naturally, they build their relationships with adults and peers in the same way as you do with others. Children subtly react to shades of mood, intonation, facial expressions of an adult. They are capable of being charged with the emotions of other people, so adults should not only be affectionate with children (and with others too), kind, but also balanced and calm. The baby should feel that the adult is his protector, assistant, kind and strong friend. From the feeling of sympathy for an adult, there arises a desire to be like him in everything.

This period of a child's life is very favorable for developing a sense of compassion. For example, if one of the adults is sick or sleeping, you need to calm the noisy child down by telling him: "Quiet, don't make noise. You see, grandma is sick. She's not feeling well and she's sleeping. Don't wake her up." At the same time, you yourself should also speak in a whisper, remembering that the child will try to imitate you. And if your words have sunk into the child's soul, then he himself can soon make a remark to an adult if he is being noisy: "Tssss! Grandma is drinking!" If you or someone else from the family has earned such a remark, then you have managed to lay the foundations of humane feelings in the child! If a child lives in an atmosphere of friendship, mutual care of family members for each other, he himself grows up benevolent and caring.

As for aesthetic education, due to age-related capabilities it is still very limited. After all, you wouldn’t take a one-and-a-half-year-old child to an art museum to look at Renaissance paintings! The fact is that a child’s perception is still of a concrete, objective nature. He or she still cannot peer, listen, or imagine as adults do. Without this, aesthetic development cannot occur. These skills develop gradually. If a family plays a musical instrument, sings, dances, and involves the child in these activities, then, naturally, his or her aesthetic development and perception of beauty occurs faster than that of a child whose family does not engage in aesthetic education.

Children living in the environment of music, dancing, hearing a cheerful melody, begin to dance, smile. They begin to love music. But aesthetic education should not be limited to musical lessons only.

It is necessary to draw the child's attention to everything beautiful that surrounds him at home or on a walk. You are walking in the park and come to a flower bed. Take the time to bend down, smell the flower, and then say: "Look, what a beautiful flower! And how it smells! Smell it yourself." Naturally, imitating you, the child will look at the flower, and smell it, saying: "A-a-h-h!", and will also try to touch it. Perhaps, if you had not drawn his attention to this beauty, he would not have noticed it, and if he had noticed, he would not have attached much importance to it. But by making an emphasis, you, without noticing it, have conducted a small lesson in aesthetic education. Such lessons should be conducted always and everywhere: "Look, what a beautiful dress the girl is wearing!", "Look, what beautiful trees with yellow leaves!", "Look, what a beautiful bird! What bright feathers it has!" A child who is shown bright, beautiful, colorful things, plants, animals, begins to notice them independently earlier. And even begins, following your example, to draw your attention to something beautiful that he likes. This is the beginning of his aesthetic development.