The goal of this paper is to identify themes of role play in Early Childhood Education. The analysis was based on studies of historical-cultural psychology. For Elkonin roleplay in preschool reaches its maximum development when children create an imaginary situation to interpret social roles oriented by rules. We observed role play situations with children from 4 ½ to 5 ½ years old in 11 municipal schools in a medium size city in the state of São Paulo. From the observations, we constructed 27 episodes of role play. The collected data analyses confirm Elkonin's thesis that role play development is related to the child social reality and indicate the necessity to establish certain conditions for this development in early childhood education. To overwhelm this condition, we argue that the teacher's mediation must be grounded on the understanding of the implications that role play has in the formation of children's personality.
Early Childhood Education; Role Play Development; Historic-Cultural Psychology; Childhood development