The creative imagination of a younger schoolchild takes shape in the zone between the recreative representation of what has been read and the independent generation of a new image, and it is precisely this zone that remains the least supported methodologically in the practice of primary literary education. A persistent discrepancy is retained between the orientation towards developing creative potential fixed in the Federal State Educational Standard of primary general education and the prevalence of reproductive techniques of work with the text, whereby interpretation is more often reduced to retelling rather than to completing the artistic world. The aim of the work is to substantiate a model of developing creative imagination in which the interpretation of the images and plots of children's literature functions not as an auxiliary procedure of comprehension but as the principal mechanism for generating new figurative structures. By means of conceptual-categorial analysis, the structural-functional approach, classification and modelling, a three-component model of interpretive-creative activity is constructed, the types of artistic images and plot constructions are differentiated according to the degree of their interpretive openness, and a correspondence is established between interpretive strategies and the planned metasubject and subject results. It is shown that the interpretive openness of an image and a plot determines the measure of creative increment available to the child: the higher the reticence of the artistic material, the wider the space for independent completion. The resulting constructions shift the emphasis from teaching the comprehension of a ready meaning towards teaching the generation of meaning within the artistic frame set by the author, which redefines the place of interpretation in the system of primary literary education.