Why Play Is How We Learn

People often ask me about academics and play in early childhood, and this morning it started out on my mind as I read these great quotes about play. Many people understand that play is how young children learn, but sometime they still wonder what about the academic preparedness? Piaget taught us that young children learn through the hands-on manipulation of materials. Vygotsky taught us that young children's learning can be scaffolded by adults intentionally supporting their learning just a little above where they currently are through their zone of proximal development. 

Today was a perfect example of what this looks like in a mixed age classroom. After winter break each year, we take advantage of the spurt in development that always seems to happen, and begin more small group work. This small group work usually takes place in the context of Choice Time, with the teachers making sure each child cycles through the groups throughout the week. This allows children who are ready for more focused instruction to spend more time in small groups with a teacher, while children who need time for open-ended experimentation with a supportive teacher are able to do this as well. Some people believe that the focused instruction is more "academic" or more likely to foster "preparedness." While it is a part of preparedness, open-ended play is almost more important for it is in play that children are able to direct their own learning, test their own hypotheses, understand the natural and physical world, build relationships with their peers, develop problem solving skills, integrate learning experiences across various domains, collaborate, investigate, and learn. It is also important that while all the children cycle through the various groups, that there is joy and choice in their play, for my most important job is to foster children's natural curiosity and joy in learning. That is the single most central element of preparedness for young children.
And so back to our morning...

Uno was again a popular choice, with children signing up to take turns in teams. Taking turns and following rules are just as important academic skills as the more obvious color and number recognition.

Play dough is beloved for its imaginative scripts from making ice cream to cutting cookies. Other academic skills include fine motor development for developing hand strength and finger articulation, sharing, problem solving, planning, collaborating, and negotiating are all important academic and social skills.

Journaling is an obvious place for readiness, as children develop their language and literacy skills. The many many components, however, are less obvious. As they develop their representational drawing skills, they begin to plan, incorporate details, use multiple colors, tell stories. Before they are ready to write themselves, they must develop the joy in their words, and as they watch us write their words, they connect meaning to the written word. The first writing they do is in their journals, signing their name. Some children are doing kid-writing, writing letters as an adult sounds out, or segments, the word. Later, the children will sound out the words themselves. Because writing is such a concrete skill that we as adults often take for granted, we forget all the incremental steps it takes to learn to write. And we must remind ourselves that at each step to forgo the rote learning we are know from our youths and embrace the fact that for young children, learning to write should be imbued the joy of learning about the power to communicate ideas.

Another popular choice this week has been the geometric tile on cork boards. Using small hammers and tacks, the children affix the shapes to the cork. Some children create free for shapes and other children use the design sheets to create designs. Creativity, spatial relationships, problem solving, and fine motor coordination are all engaged in this work.

Facilitating Dialogue

The block area was very popular this morning, and I sat down to observe all the goings-on. I recently visited the TriBeCa Community School in Manhattan where one of the teachers described their approach to problem solving saying, "We don't negotiate turn-taking; we facilitate dialogue." I loved this framing of the issue, and so I sat down with the intention to try it out. It turns out there was a lot  of dialogue to facilitate, and that with very little help, the Turtles are able to really navigate some of these conversations. Instead of asking directive questions like "Who had it first?" I ask questions like:

What is the problem?
How can we solve this problem?
How did that make you feel?
Did you tell your friend?
How did that make your friend feel?
What's your idea?
What's you friend's idea?

With a little bit of support, a couple different dyads worked happily and constructively for almost half an hour! They built castles, garages, and a highway.

Spreading the Joy of Outdoor Learning: Greening Urban School Yards

I was so lucky to be a part of an amazing Collaborative Design Charrette and Public Presentation today in Center City. I am so excited about this initiative which brought together experts like landscape achitects (including my talented friends at Viridian Landscape Studio) with community members, educators, parents, students, and school district officials. Our mission was to generate ideas and ultimately master plan sketches for the greening of two Philadelphia schoolyards: John B. Kelly School (a K-6 school just down the street from my Germantown house) and Lea School in West Philadelphia. I was able to draw on the research and conversations we have had here at AFS as we have planned the new outdoor initiative AFS Outdoors, especially around the ways that connections to nature foster deeper learning for people of all ages. The process and results were simply amazing, and it was so inspiring to be a part of this important work!

Diversity Everyday

Recently, a few blogs popped up in my feed on the importance of talking about race with young children. This is not always an easy topic for families or educators, especially white families and educators. As a white teacher, I have had a long journey of coming to understand race and diversity in my own life and in the life of the children in my classroom. Critical to my understanding of how to talk about these issues with young children is the book, Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves, and the older Anti-Bias Curriculum. They outline a very simple and developmentally appropriate (which are, of course, the magic words) to developing all children's ability to recognize and counter bias in our culture.
This can be hard for parents to think about, and harder still for them to talk to young children about. But it is very necessary. In the somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog post, How To Raise Racist Kids, Jonathan Liu points out that the single best way to perpetuate bias is:

Don’t talk about race. Don’t point out skin color. Be “color blind.”

He offers evidence and reasearch to back this up, and then point us on to five tips for talking about racism with kids.

The other day, I was having a conversation with a prospective parent (who was white) about the importance of a diverse environment for young children to learn, "especially in today's world," a refrain I often hear. I enthusiastically agreed with him, adding, however, that simply being in a diverse environment does not teach young children to understand and resist the prejudice that subtly (and not always so subtly) infiltrates our society. We must do what we may not have been taught do to (especially if we are white), and talk about it, everyday, even if it is awkward, or we don't get it just right the first time. Because Black history isn't important just one month of the year, and understanding identity, diversity, and bias don't just happen magically.

What about you? What messages did you get about race as a little person? Was it okay to talk about?
If you have kids, what happens at your house? Does your child talk about race? Do you feel comfortable talking with them about race? Do you talk with other families about race? 
If you are an educator, do you feel comfortable talking with your students about race? Do you get support for these conversations?

What is Meanness? Jumping into the Unknown with Emergent Social Curriculum

So for a while, my assistant teacher and I have been working with our class of 3 and 4 year olds to find ways to solve problems, and to be kind to each other. As is very typical for three and four year olds, however, many children have been experimenting with inclusion and exclusion and what it means to be friends. It seemed like we had been handling the incidents on a case by case basis, often stepping in as adults to resolve the problem. As the teachers thought about this, and how it was affecting the mood of the classroom, we decided to take a new and different approach. We decided to bring the problem to the children, and see if we could investigate the problem. We are calling it: The Meanness Problem. Like many of our projects, this undertaking is not one that we have done before, so we do not have a concrete map of where we are going. Rather we have guiding research questions that we have presented to the children:

What is meanness? How do you know if something is mean? Where is all the meanness coming from? 

We started the project today with a GIANT piece of paper, to symbolize how this was a big big problem. On this paper, we will write our observations about meanness. In our first discussion today, the children sat with rapt attention, and had many ideas about meanness. They clearly had experienced the meanness, and knew many many ways to say mean words. We studiously wrote down the children's ideas. "Meannes is liek when you say, 'You can't come to my birthday party,'" "When you say that you're not my best friend anymore," or "When somebody tells somebody that they are not gong to play cars anymore." They suggested drawing a mean face so we would know what the writing was about, and so we drew a mean face with slanted eyebrows and "mean teeth." We asked them to help us do the research together, and anytime somebody said or did something mean, we would write it on the paper to gather our data on meanness. In our next meeting, we will ask the children how we can learn more about the meanness.

This is a different approach to the social issues of three and four year olds than we as teachers typically take. My assistent and I have had discussions about the best way to talk about this problem with the children, and we have spoken with other educators as well. She is eager to do a corollary niceness project, while I am interested in following the thread of meanness to see if we can uncover more information about where this problem is coming from. We will find ways to pursue both avenues, finding ways to document both the problem, and how the children are thinking about solving it through teamwork, cooperation, and kindness. I want to figure out how they understand the meanness in the room, and how they think that we can dispell it. I want the children to own this problem. Only then can we start to figure out how to get it out. One child said, "Where is all this meanness coming from? It's a mystery!" And there is nothing that this class loves move than a mystery to solve!
As adults, it can feel uncomfortable to dwell on the negative emotions that exclusion in play can bring up for us, and it can be tempting to jump to the opposite of kindness. This exploration of exclusion is a fundemental part of child development, and it feels like we have a group of children with the social intelligence to tackle this problem head on, dealing directly with the "mean" and think about how it is affecting the individuals and the group. We are interested to see where this goes and how the class will figure out how to solve the problem. We also encouraged the families to have conversations with their child about the subject and to share any thoughts that they have with us so we can add it to our research.
What about you, dear reader? Do you remember being mean as a young child? Or someone being mean to you? Can you help us with our research on meanness?

Is it safe? Is it kind? Revisited

Little people are learning so much about their world, and just like they hammer on play dough to see what will happen, just like they endlessly build ramps for their cars, just like they swirl paint colors mixing across paper, they are figuring out how to play with each other. They are figuring out what happens when they invite a friend to play, when they tell a friend their idea, when the follow a friends lead, and, yes, when they tell a friend "You're not my best friend anymore!"
This socialization is perhaps the most complicated work of a preschooler. The Ooey Gooey Lady, Lisa Murray tells a story about a parent meeting where families were very concerned about their preschoolers academic progress. She asked the families for a show of hands: "How many of you know all you colors?" and everyone raised their hands. Her next question also resulted in a full show of hands: "How many of you have trouble getting along with someone at work?"
The work of social development is particularly rich in early childhood, as young children work within their ego-centric phase of development to figure out how to play with other children. This starts, of course, in what my friend Carol Wolf calls the "Sharing is stupid" phase of development. "I have it," (whatever it is), "and you can't have it." Slowly slowly two and three year olds start to figure out that other children are doing cool stuff, cool stuff that they could do too. They play alongside each other, copy ideas and play schema. They make offerings, sharing a play dough tool, or adding a sprinkle of sand to their friend's sand cake.

And pretty soon, they are engaging in the most wondrous of things: cooperative play! And here is where a teacher's job gets really tricky. How do I support their play, helping them gain the skills without imposing my adult ideas, without squashing the joyful exploration? Betty Jones, a brilliant teacher and professor from my graduate school Pacific Oaks College, literally wrote the book on teachers' roles in children's play. According to Betty, teachers are the stage managers, mediators, players, scribes, assessors, communicators, and planners. Most of these are pretty self-evident, but the one that I come back to again and again is being the mediator. Each year in my classroom, I hear the loud declaration, "You can't come to my birthday party!" or the even more dangerous quiet hiss, "You're not my best friend anymore!" Sometimes there has been a provocation leading up to this exchange, sometimes not. But in just about every case, the child doing the declaring looks vaguely triumphant, the other child crestfallen. The thing that is true about three and four year olds is that for the most part, they are not yet the mean girl bullies of Rachel Simmons. Just like they are experimenting with the physical properties of sand as they sift it through their fingers at the sensory table, they are trying to figure out how friendship works, and so as mediators we have to figure out how to support this development.

At this point, it is often tempting as the teacher to step in with the blanket statement, inspired by Vivian Paley's wonderful book,"You can't say you can't play."  (For exceptions to this rule, check out Teacher Tom's post, Sometimes, you can say you can't play.) If I have laid the ground work with the group of children, this reminder will sometimes work. (The groundwork often includes many interactive and overly dramatized puppet shows.) Other times, it involves conversations about how that makes the other child feel, probing into what the cause of the problem is, and sometimes even a trip to the Peace Table. At Morning Meeting, I introduced the ideas of three simple questions: "Is it safe? Is it kind? Does it build community?" and the first two questions have been picked up by many kids in the class. The trick that I have to remember is that I am also bound by these same questions, and that in my mediation, in desire to help the crying child or to right a perceived wrong, I also should be kind.

Learning to Play

So today unfolded like many days in the busy life of the Turtles: the older threes and fours immediately dove into an active dramatic play game acting out the roles of cats and caregivers. As some of the newer players started to arrive, they would watch the experienced players easily take on role, negotiate scripts, and work through different ideas. I sat down on the floor to watch, and soon I was surrounded by my youngest Turtles, also watching the play. The cats and caregivers game morphed into a restaurant game with the fluidity of young imaginations, and I joined the game, with two of my three young Turtles following me. They sat down at the restaurant, becoming the "babies" and the "customers" according to the other Turtles who declared themselves the waiters and the cooks. The waiters and the cooks played out a sophisticated script of making and bringing menus, asking for orders, bringing food, clearing plates, bringing a check and receipt, and even making a to-go box for the "left-over chocolate cake." The customers happily followed along the lead of the master players, and towards the end, one "baby" even asked for the chocolate cake for her "treat." I talked about the game later with one of the younger kids, and she said that next time, she wasn't going to be a baby. She was going to be a "big girl!"
It was so neat to see the ways that the older children scaffolded the younger children, and to see how the older children were truly the "master players," that Betty Jones describes in her book The Play's the Thing. Sometimes people are skeptical about mixed-age groups, worrying that the older children won't have the stimulation they need, but in my experience, it is just the oppostie: mixed age groups bring out the best in all the kids. Just like when my brothers and I were playing elaborate clubhouse games with all the kids on the block, the older ones figured out ways to teach the younger ones, and the younger ones got to learn from them.

On the playground the other day, two of my older kids were tearing around the patio on the tandem bike. An almost three year old from another class watched with excitement, following them and wanting to try their bike. They started to get annoyed with him, and then I pointed out that he was still figuring out how to play, and maybe they could help him learn. It was like switch had been flipped. Their faces lit up, and they glibly told him, "You can have a turn in five minutes." The little one beamed, and the big boys sped off, now not minding the company, understanding that he was waiting his turn, and maybe, could even be part of the game.
I feel like I am just scratching the surface of the many ways that younger and older children can learn together. I want to think more about leadership opportunities for the older ones, and ways to help the younger ones feel powerful and important too. I want to observe how this naturally happens and consider how I can scaffold it. I want to think about how to talk about these growing skills in Morning Meeting, drawing on the reflection skills of the older ones and the observation skills of the younger ones. I am excited by the taste of this that I am getting this year, and excited for next year, when I will have an even wider range of ages!