OLYMPIAD ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOR PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS AS A FORM OF EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES: THE PROBLEM OF DESIGN
Extracurricular activities are an obligatory component of the federal state educational standard of primary education. The competent organization of extracurricular activities ensures not only the development of students' interest in learning, but also a deeper assimilation of educational material. Extracurricular activities become even more relevant in the teaching of foreign languages, as it is the tool that shows the student the importance of learning foreign languages, provides them with opportunities to apply the studied material in practice, and forms the language environment that is absent in everyday life of students. There are a lot of forms of organization extracurricular activities, but with all the diversity, more attention is paid to relatively few of them. So, speaking about primary school, the popular forms of extracurricular activities in foreign languages are children clubs (theater, music), concerts (matinees, plays), parties, less often quizzes. However, recently due to the attention of the state standard to the development of universal educational skills and the introduction of a portfolio of individual student achievements into the learning process, the increasing interest of teachers, parents and schoolchildren manifests itself to the special form of extracurricular activity which is an olympiad. The main goal of this article is to describe the development process and the materials of the Olympiad «British Friends» on the basis of an analysis of the existing English Olympiads. This model can be used to develop control and measurement materials intended for different purposes: for holding Olympiads in foreign languages among junior schoolchildren; to assess the quality of extracurricular activities in schools and in institutions of additional education; to create final tests. The authors analyze extracurricular activities and its significance in teaching foreign languages. Characterizing the main results of the study, the authors describe the content of the existing olympiads for primary schoolchildren, reveal the problems of the measurement materials. Further, the authors proceed to describe their own model of the Olympiad in English, proposed on the basis of modern standards and taking into account psychological characteristics of primary school students and specific features of the subject itself. The analysis of the approbation of the Olympiad indicates that its materials can be applied in extracurricular activities, promote its activation, and also increase the interest in learning a foreign language by younger schoolchildren.