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Welcome along to our Play in the Classroom E-Newsletter. You are receiving this newsletter as a subscriber to our website or because you have attended one of our Learning through Play in the Classroom Workshops. We hope this newsletter will continue to provide you with inspiration and ideas to assist you along your journey teaching and learning through play in your classroom.

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The Global Search For Education: The Need to Play

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The Global Search For Education: The Need to Play

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Global Search for Education | CMRubinWorld

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"Giving children meaningful, quality, free play opportunities in this period of exponential brain growth is the best, most cost-effective way to prepare them with the skills required to live in our modern society." - Marcus Veerman
The research that's been done on the importance of play is extensive. From the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends play as "essential to development because it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children," to the UN's High Commission for Human Rights, which asserts that play is the right of every child because of its importance to optimal child development, having a safe place to play is acknowledged as an essential need.

What happens when you're very poor and a safe place to play is not an option?

Marcus Veerman (the Founder and CEO of Playground Ideas) says he first became inspired to build playgrounds when he visited Mae Sot, Thailand with his wife Willow. He arrived with no plans; just an open mind and an eagerness to do whatever he could to help the community. He built a geodesic dome sauna and taught photography to children. He also "dabbled" in making motorbike trailers, bamboo, linoleum kayaks, solar ovens, and hot water services from local materials. Eventually, a local organization asked him to build a playground. With his inquisitive mind, Marcus naturally responded, "why not?" He built a playground with a team of volunteers and builders. Despite the playground's simplicity, it was such a success that it led to many more requests of a similar nature. In the span of 2 years, they built 40 playgrounds along the Thai-Burma border. Since 2007, Veerman's organization, Playground Ideas, has provided aid and inspiration and helped to build 2,147 playgrounds globally, changing the lives of over a million children.
"What we know works, in terms of long-term sustainability, is when the community itself has the desire for a play space, comes up with the funds, sources local, affordable materials and the people to build it and has ownership of the whole project." - Marcus Veerman Which playground (out of 2000 you've helped to build) gives you the most satisfaction and why?
The Global Search for Education welcomes Marcus Veerman, Founder and CEO of Playground Ideas.

Many people around the world (currently in 143 countries) have used our ideas and designs to build their own playgrounds. Of the many playgrounds that I have been part of, the Ruben Centre in Kenya stands out as one of the most satisfying. It was created with two amazing colleagues, Elizabeth Moreno and Amy Church, and was in the center of Kenya's third largest Slum. 600,000 people live in Mukuru, a densely packed dusty maze of streets where, right at the center is a school with over 2000 children. Although they had a large football field, our community consultation showed how precious that open space was for everything from football to weddings, so instead of building over it, we built 5 pocket playgrounds throughout the whole site in all the little nooks we found. The children showed us how they were making their own toys from a particular type of local clay, and we took that activity (which concerned teachers because of the messiness) and created a ceramics area with craft tables, turning it into a sustainable, creative space that both children loved and teachers could see the benefit of. The community consultation also uncovered the everyday trauma so many children faced, and so we allowed them to explore their experiences in a safe and supportive environment by creating a play town containing a hospital and pharmacy.
"Play is a child's primary tool to develop and that is why the brain so richly rewards children with a happy high of hormones when they do it." After a playground is built, what's the plan for sustainability? What does it take to create lasting "play"?- Marcus Veerman If you were to ask your "playground communities" how your playgrounds have impacted their lives what would the different audiences most likely say? What would they want to improve?
Two months after the build, the Ruben staff conducted an internal survey about the playground. The head teacher acknowledged "that the playground has added value to the school and the children generally love the new ground. Children have become very active both in classes and outdoors and their concentration in class has improved, which she sighted is due to a fresh and relaxed mind. The playground is a motivation for kids to come to school. In fact, it is very hard to get them out of school in the evenings after classes because they want to remain behind and play. The playground has also made outdoor classes easier. For instance, in mathematics, teachers use a four way seesaw to demonstrate weighing and balancing concepts to pupils. In social studies, pupils can use the village section of the field to learn various cultural aspects of Kenyan communities."
"Through play, children experiment and test out possibilities. The very nature of play is that it allows children to pretend, to explore different alternatives, to problem solve and to be creative." Imagination and innovation are critical in the age of machines. What are your best tips for how we nurture these skills in humans?- Marcus Veerman
The whole story behind Playground Ideas is that it is totally unsustainable for some white guy from Australia to fly around the world, building what he thinks is a cool playground for a community and then hightailing it out of there. It's also unsustainable and difficult to ship playgrounds in. What we know works, in terms of long term sustainability, is when the community itself has the desire for a play space, comes up with the funds, sources local, affordable materials and the people to build it and has ownership of the whole project. Our role is to simply fill in any gaps in knowledge through our online resources that anyone can access for free. When the community has ownership, they are more likely to maintain the playground, to use it and look after it, and they are vested in it lasting for kids to come. Our open-source on demand model attracts highly motivated individuals ready to make a change in their community.

The other way we work is by helping NGOs roll out major programs as part of much larger education system programs that are linked with the long term plans of government.
C. M. Rubin and Marcus Veerman Join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (U.S.), Dr. Leon Botstein (U.S.), Professor Clay Christensen (U.S.), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (U.S.), Dr. MadhavChavan (India), Charles Fadel (U.S.), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (U.S.), Professor Andy Hargreaves (U.S.), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (U.S.), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Honourable Jeff Johnson (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. EijaKauppinen (Finland), State Secretary TapioKosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Lord Ken Macdonald (UK), Professor Geoff Masters (Australia), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (U.S.), Richard Wilson Riley (U.S.), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Professor Manabu Sato (Japan), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (U.S.), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (U.S.), Yves Theze (LyceeFrancais U.S.), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (U.S.), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today. The Global Search for Education Community Page C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair award, "The Global Search for Education" and "How Will We Read?" She is also the author of three bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland, is the publisher of CMRubinWorldand is a Disruptor Foundation Fellow.
Play is a child's primary tool to develop and that is why the brain so richly rewards children with a happy high of hormones when they do it. Without it, they will struggle and fail to thrive throughout their lives. Suffice it to say that kids love what we do. Teachers, on the other hand, are often reluctant at first to relinquish class time over to play time, thinking it frivolous and dangerous. Yet evaluations conducted have then shown that teachers find that children who have more time to play are better able to concentrate in class and that the children learn vital skills unable to be taught in a formal education setting.

Through play, children experiment and test out possibilities. The very nature of play is that it allows children to pretend, to explore different alternatives, to problem solve and to be creative. Studies have shown that children in developmentally appropriate play-based settings scored higher on measures of creativity, or divergent thinking, than children in academically oriented classrooms and that children engaged in elaborate pretend play scenarios are then better able to perform counterfactual reasoning.

Yes, our brains are plastic and we can learn to be more creative later on. But in early life our brains are forming pathways we often carry throughout our lives. Giving children meaningful, quality, free play opportunities in this period of exponential brain growth is the best, most cost effective way to prepare them with the skills required to live in our modern society.

(All photos are courtesy of Playground Ideas)

Follow C. M. Rubin on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cmrubinworld

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The Global Search For Education: The Need to Play

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"Giving children meaningful, quality, free play opportunities in this period of exponential brain growth is the best, most cost-effective way to prepare them with the skills required to live in our modern society." - Marcus Veerman The research that's been done on the importance of play is extensive.

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Big Ideas: G1 PL Meeting Supporting our Early Writers - Google Docs

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Big Ideas: G1 PL Meeting Supporting our Early Writers - Google Docs

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Big Ideas: G1 PL Meeting  Supporting our Early Writers

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Promoting Preschoolers’ Emergent Writing | NAEYC

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Promoting Preschoolers’ Emergent Writing | NAEYC

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Emergent writing is young children's first attempts at the writing process. Children as young as 2 years old begin to imitate the act of writing by creating drawings and symbolic markings that represent their thoughts and ideas (Rowe & Neitzel 2010; Dennis & Votteler 2013). This is the beginning of a series of stages that children progress through as they learn to write (see "Stages of Emergent Writing"). Emergent writing skills, such as the development of namewriting proficiency, are important predictors of children's future reading and writing skills (National Center for Family & Literacy 2008; Puranik & Lonigan 2012).

Teachers play an important role in the development of 3- to 5-year-olds' emergent writing by encouraging children to communicate their thoughts and record their ideas (Hall et al. 2015). In some early childhood classrooms, however, emergent writing experiences are almost nonexistent. One recent study, which is in accord with earlier research, found that 4- and 5-year-olds (spread across 81 classrooms) averaged just two minutes a day either writing or being taught writing (Pelatti et al. 2014). This article shares a framework for understanding emergent writing and ties the framework to differentiating young children's emergent writing experiences.

Understanding emergent writing

Researchers and educators often use the term emergent literacy to define a broad set of language and literacy skills focused primarily on the development and significance of emergent reading skills. To better understand writing development-and to support teachers' work with young children-researchers have proposed a framework to explain emergent writing practices (Puranik & Lonigan 2014). The framework is composed of three domains: conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and generative knowledge.

Conceptual knowledge includes learning the function of writing. In this domain, young children learn that writing has a purpose and that print is meaningful (i.e., it communicates ideas, stories, and facts). For example, young children become aware that the red street sign says Stop and the letters under the yellow arch spell McDonald's. They recognize that certain symbols, logos, and markings have specific meanings (Wu 2009).

Procedural knowledge is the mechanics of letter and word writing (e.g., name writing) and includes spelling and gaining alphabet knowledge. Learning the alphabetic code (including how to form letters and the sounds associated with each letter) is an essential component of gaining procedural knowledge. Children benefit from having multiple opportunities throughout the day to develop fine motor skills and finger dexterity using a variety of manipulatives (e.g., magnetic letters, pegboards) and writing implements.

Generative knowledge describes children's abilities to write phrases and sentences that convey meaning. It is the ability to translate thoughts into writing that goes beyond the word level (Puranik & Lonigan 2014). During early childhood, teachers are laying the foundation for generative knowledge as children learn to express themselves orally and experiment with different forms of written communication, such as composing a story, writing notes, creating lists, and taking messages. Children can dictate words, phrases, or sentences that an adult can record on paper, or they can share ideas for group writing.

Developing conceptual, procedural, and generative knowledge of writing

Children gain knowledge of and interest in writing as they are continually exposed to print and writing in their environment. There are multiple strategies teachers can use to scaffold children's writing, such as verbally reminding children to use writing in their classroom activities and providing appropriate writing instructions (Gerde, Bingham, & Wasik 2012). By being aware of children's current fine motor abilities and their progress in emergent writing, teachers can use a mix of strategies to foster growth in each child's zone of proximal development (Vygotsky 1978).

Practicing name writing

One of the first words children usually learn to write is their first name (Both-de Vries & Bus 2008). Name writing increases children's conceptual and procedural knowledge. Names are meaningful to children, and preschoolers typically are interested in learning to write the letters in their name, especially the first letter (Both-de Vries & Bus 2008). Namewriting proficiency provides a foundation for other literacy knowledge and skills; it is associated with alphabet knowledge, letter writing, print concepts, and spelling (Cabell et al. 2009; Drouin & Harmon 2009; Puranik & Lonigan 2012).

Preschoolers benefit from daily writing experiences, so it is helpful to embed writing in the daily routine, such as having children write (or attempt to write) their names at sign-in and during choice times. Be sensitive to preschoolers' varying levels of fine motor skills and promote the joy of experimenting with the art of writing, regardless of a child's current skill level. Encourage invented spelling (Ouellette & Sénéchal 2017) and attempts at writing letters or letter-like symbols.

As Ms. Han's preschoolers enter the classroom, they sign in, with parental support, by writing their names on a whiteboard at the classroom entrance. Children in Ms. Noel's classroom go to a special table and sign in as they enter the room. Ms. Patel instructs her preschoolers to answer the question of the day by writing their names under their chosen answers. Today, the children write their names to answer the question "What are your favorite small animals-piglets, ducklings, or kittens?" Juan and Maria help their friends read the question and write their names under the appropriate headings. Pedro writes Pdr under the piglets heading, Anthony writes his complete name under ducklings, and Tess writes the letter T under kittens. In Mr. Ryan's class, children write their names during different activities. Today, children sign in as they pretend to visit the doctor in one learning center and sign for a package delivery in another. Meanwhile, Tommy walks around the room asking other preschoolers to sign their names in the autograph book he created in the writing center.

Tips for teachers

Develop a sign-in or sign-out routine that allows children to write, or attempt to write, their names each day. In some classrooms, or for some children, the routine may begin with writing the first letter instead of the whole name or with scribbling letterlike symbols.

Use peer helpers to aid children with the name-writing process.

Model writing your name and promote name-writing activities in several centers through the day, such as having children sign their name as they write a prescription or when they complete a painting.

Learning from teacher modeling

Children benefit from teachers modeling writing and from opportunities to interact with others on writing projects. Teachers can connect writing to topics of interest, think aloud about the process of composing a message (Dennis & Votteler 2013), and explain how to plan what to write (e.g., choosing words and topics, along with the mechanics of writing, such as punctuation). Children struggling to attain early writing skills benefit from explicit teaching (Hall et al. 2015). Teach children that letters create words and words create sentences. Use environmental print (e.g., labels, charts, signs, toy packaging, clothing, and billboards) to help children realize that print is meaningful and functional (Neumann, Hood, & Ford 2013). These types of activities build both conceptual and procedural knowledge.

When Ms. Noel sits with the children during snack, she talks with them about the different foods they like to eat. Ben tells her he likes chicken. She writes on a small whiteboard, "Ben likes chicken." She asks Ben to read the phrase to a friend. Later, Ben writes the phrase himself.

Mr. Ryan conducts a sticky note poll. He creates a giant spiderweb and writes the question, "Are you afraid of spiders? Yes or no." He gives the children sticky notes so each can write either yes or no and then place it on the giant web. This activity is followed by a discussion of spiders.

Tips for teachers

Explicitly model writing by showing the writing process to children and thinking aloud while writing. Instead of writing the question of the day or the morning message before the children arrive, write it in front of them.

​Label specific items in the room, and draw children's attention to the written words. Write out functional phrases on signs related to routines, such as "Take three crackers" or "Wash hands before eating," then read and display the signs.

​Have the children paint large classroom signs related to themes being explored, such as the National Weather Station, Snack Bar, Public Library, or Entomology Center.

Writing throughout the day

Preschoolers enjoy experimenting with the writing process. Emergent writing experiences can include spontaneous writing during center time and teacherguided writing activities. Writing can become an important component of every learning center in the preschool classroom (Pool & Carter 2011), especially if teachers strategically place a variety of writing materials throughout the classroom and offer specific guidance on using the materials (Mayer 2007). (See "Learning Centers: Adding Meaningful Writing Materials and Literacy Props.")

Teachers can intentionally promote peer-to-peer scaffolding by having children participate in collaborative writing experiences. Read-alouds are also a wonderful means of promoting writing; there are a number of stories that feature characters in books writing letters, stories, messages, and lists (see "Books That Promote Writing"). Model writing stories, making lists, or labeling objects, and then encourage your preschoolers to write a response letter to a character in a story, create their own storybook, or write a wish list or a shopping list. Such a variety of writing experiences will also build their generative knowledge of writing.

Ms. Han has strategically placed a variety of writing materials throughout the classroom-a scientific journal in the discovery area so children can record their observations and ideas; a graph paper notebook in the block area for drafting blueprints with designs and words; and a receipt book, paper, and markers in the dramatic play area. Savannah sits at the discovery center looking at a classroom experiment. Ms. Han asks, "Savannah, could you write about your observations in our science journal?" Savannah begins writing in the journal.

Three boys are playing in the block area. Ms. Han asks, "What are you building?" Marcus replies, "We are going to build a rocket ship." Ms. Han says, "Could you create a blueprint of your rocket and then build it?" The boys eagerly begin drawing a plan. Several children in the dramatic play center are drawing different types of flowers for a flower market. Ms. Han says, "In a flower market, signs tell customers what is for sale and how much it costs. Would you like to create some signs?" The children readily agree and start to create signs.

Tips for teachers

Strategically place writing materials, such as sticky notes, small chalkboards, whiteboards, envelopes, clipboards, journals, stencils, golf pencils, markers, and various types, sizes, and colors of paper throughout the classroom.

Provide specific teacher guidance to scaffold children's writing. While some children may be off and running with an open-ended question, others might be better supported if the teacher helps write their ideas-at least to get them started.

Create writing opportunities connected to your current classroom themes or topics of interest. Involve the children in collaborative writing projects, such as creating a diorama after a farm visit and making labels for the different animals and the barn. With teacher support, the class could also develop a narrative to describe their farm visit.

Home-school connection

Both preschool writing instruction and home writing experiences are essential components of helping children develop writing skills. A major advantage of the home- school connection is that children see the value of what they learn in school when parents actively participate in the same type of activities at home. Teachers can encourage parents to display photos of their child engaged in writing activities at home and to share samples of their child's writing or drawings from home to inform instruction (Schickedanz & Casbergue 2009). To maximize parental involvement and support, teachers should be sensitive to the diversity of the families in their programs and be inclusive by promoting writing in children's home languages. These experiences can help promote children's conceptual, procedural, and generative knowledge.

Ms. Noel wants to strengthen home-school connections with the families in her program. She decides to introduce the children to Chester (a stuffed teddy bear). She tells the children that Chester wants to learn more about what the children do at home and to go on some weekend adventures. She says, "Each weekend, Chester will travel home with a child in our class. During the time Chester stays at your house, take pictures of the activities you do with Chester and write about them in the Chester Weekend Adventures journal. At the beginning of the week, bring Chester and the journal back to school to share what you did. We will put Chester and the journal in the classroom library when he is not on a visit, so everyone can see where he has been." The children are excited about taking Chester home and writing about their adventures.

Tips for teachers

Find writing opportunities that strengthen home-school connections. For example, encourage families to create books at home related to a particular theme or a specific topic. Invite children to share their books with the class and then add them to the library.

Invite families to share the types of writing activities their children engage in at home. Encourage parents to establish routines that include writing lists, messages, stories, and letters.

Give families postcards to mail to friends in other states and countries. Have them ask their friends to mail a reply to the preschool class. Create a display of the return messages and postcards.

Teachers play an important role in promoting emergent writing development by scaffolding writing activities that engage young children in building their conceptual, procedural, and generative knowledge. Writing can easily be embedded in daily routines as children write their names, engage in learning centers, practice writing for a purpose based on teacher and peer models, and contribute to group writing activities. Be intentional during interactions with children and incorporate best practices. Promote the development of emergent writing-and emergent literacy-by implementing purposeful strategies that encourage writing in the classroom and at home. Teachers who provide young children with a diverse array of early writing experiences lay the foundation for kindergarten readiness.

Authors' note: A special thanks to all of the teachers who participated in the Striving Readers Literacy Program and shared their literacy ideas. Thanks to Barbara Berrios for sharing the Chester Bear idea.

References

Both-de Vries, A.C., & A.G. Bus. 2008. "Name Writing: A First Step to Phonetic Writing? Does the Name Have a Special Role in Understanding the Symbolic Function of Writing?" Literacy Teaching and Learning 12 (2): 37-55.

Cabell, S.Q., L.M. Justice, T.A. Zucker, & A.S. McGinty. 2009. "Emergent Name-Writing Abilities of Preschool-Age Children with Language Impairment." Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools 40 (1): 53-66.

Dennis, L.R., & N.K. Votteler. 2013. "Preschool Teachers and Children's Emergent Writing: Supporting Diverse Learners." Early Childhood Education Journal 41 (6): 439-46.

Drouin, M., & J. Harmon. 2009. "Name Writing and Letter Knowledge in Preschoolers: Incongruities in Skills and the Usefulness of Name Writing as a Developmental Indicator." Early Childhood Research Quarterly 24 (3): 263-70.

Gerde, H.K., G.E. Bingham, & B.A. Wasik. 2012. "Writing in Early Childhood Classrooms: Guidance for Best Practices." Early Childhood Education Journal 40 (6): 351-59.

Hall, A.H., A. Simpson, Y. Guo, & S. Wang. 2015. "Examining the Effects of Preschool Writing Instruction on Emergent Literacy Skills: A Systematic Review of the Literature." Literacy Research and Instruction 54 (2): 115-34.

Mayer, K. 2007. "Emerging Knowledge about Emergent Writing." Young Children 62 (1): 34-41.

National Center for Family Literacy. 2008. Developing Early Literacy: A Scientific Synthesis of Early Literacy Development and Implications for Intervention. Report of the National Early Literacy Panel. Washington, DC: National Institute for Literacy.

Neumann, M.M., M. Hood, & R.M. Ford. 2013. "Using Environmental Print to Enhance Emergent Literacy and Print Motivation." Reading and Writing 26 (5): 771-93.

Ouellette, G., & M. Sénéchal. 2017. "Invented Spelling in Kindergarten as a Predictor of Reading and Spelling in Grade 1: A New Pathway to Literacy, or Just the Same Road, Less Known?" Developmental Psychology 53 (1): 77-88.

Pelatti, C.Y., S.B. Piasta, L.M. Justice, & A. O'Connell. 2014. "Language- and Literacy-Learning Opportunities in Early Childhood Classrooms: Children's Typical Experiences and Within-Classroom Variability." Early Childhood Research Quarterly 29 (4): 445-56.

Pool, J.L., & D.R. Carter. 2011. "Creating Print-Rich Learning Centers." Teaching Young Children 4 (4): 18-20.

Puranik, C.S., & C.J. Lonigan. 2012. "Name-Writing Proficiency, Not Length of Name, Is Associated with Preschool Children's Emergent Literacy Skills." Early Childhood Research Quarterly 27 (2): 284-94.

Puranik, C.S., & C.J. Lonigan. 2014. "Emergent Writing in Preschoolers: Preliminary Evidence for a Theoretical Framework." Reading Research Quarterly 49 (4): 453-67.

Rowe, D.W., & C. Neitzel. 2010. "Interest and Agency in 2- and 3-Year-Olds' Participation in Emergent Writing." Reading Research Quarterly 45 (2): 169-95.

Schickedanz, J.A., & R.M. Casbergue. 2009. Writing in Preschool: Learning to Orchestrate Meaning and Marks. 2nd ed. Preschool Literacy Collection. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Vygotsky, L.S. 1978. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Ed. & trans. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wu, L.Y. 2009. "Children's Graphical Representations and Emergent Writing: Evidence from Children's Drawings." Early Child Development and Care 179 (1): 69-79.

Photographs: pp. 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, courtesy of the authors; p. 74, © iStock

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Emergent writing skills, such as the development of namewriting proficiency, are important predictors of children's future reading and writing skills.

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Why Is My Kid Allowed to Make Spelling Mistakes? | Cult of Pedagogy

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Why Is My Kid Allowed to Make Spelling Mistakes? | Cult of Pedagogy

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Dear Cult of Pedagogy, Last week, my son brought home a stack of papers from his first-grade class. Some of them had obvious spelling errors, but no one had marked them wrong. Later that same day, I was helping my 10-year-old daughter with a research paper. I noticed a few misspellings on her draft, but when I pointed them out, she said, "My teacher told us not to worry about spelling when we're drafting." What's the deal? Why don't teachers seem to care about spelling anymore?
When kids first learn how to write, they grapple with many different skills at once. After they master letters and build them into words, their next step is stringing those words together into complete ideas. That takes a lot of mental work, and trying to spell every word perfectly can slow the whole process way down. For this reason, many teachers in the early grades encourage inventive spelling, also known as temporary spelling - where the child makes his best guess on the spelling of the word, rather than stopping to find out the correct version.

This practice is grounded in research. A number of studies demonstrate that kids who are allowed to use inventive spelling learn to write more quickly, more fluently, and with a richer vocabulary than those who work under more rigid spelling expectations (Kolodziej & Columba, 2005).

Researchers suggest that parents think about inventive spelling the way they once viewed their child's early attempts at speech:

When the child said "ba-ba," did the parent say, "No, honey, it is pronounced "bottle"? Parents treasure this developmental step their child took towards conventional speaking by lavishly praising the child and offering the bottle...The child will not call the item a "ba-ba" for the rest of his/her life; rather, when the child is developmentally ready, he/she will be able to say "bottle" (Kolodziej & Columba, 2005, p. 217).

In the later years, spelling does "count," but it has a time and a place. Most writing teachers use some version of the Writing Process, where students are taught to (1) gather and group their ideas (pre-writing), (2) flesh out those ideas in sentences and paragraphs (drafting), and (3) reorganize the piece so that it accomplishes the writer's goals (revising). Only then, after the piece has been revised into a shape that's close to finished, do most teachers tell their students to start the next step: editing. In this stage, final corrections are made to spelling, punctuation, and usage.

The reason spelling and mechanics are de-emphasized in the first few steps is the same as in the younger grades: Too much focus on correctness interrupts the flow of ideas. Furthermore, teachers want students to understand that good writers revise their pieces many times for structure, development, clarity and voice. Although the mechanics are important for polish, correct spelling can't make up for a poorly structured, underdeveloped piece of writing. And if a piece is going to be revised several times, it makes no sense to keep correcting the mechanics, only to have those words dumped entirely in a later revision.

Producing a finished piece of writing is a lot like putting on a polished musical performance: It requires the synthesis of many skills, some of which need to be handled separately. Imagine if a band conductor brought a brand-new piece of music to her band and expected all sections to play it together, perfectly, the first time. Even someone with no musical training can see that this is an unreasonable approach. Instead, if each instrument section starts by practicing their part separately, the performers will get really solid on their individual parts before pulling it all together to refine the complete performance.

So what should you do if your child comes home with a paper full of spelling or other mechanical errors? Take a cue from the teacher: If the teacher hasn't mentioned the errors, then spelling was not a priority for this particular assignment or at this particular stage. Instead, praise the content itself. Here are some specific things to look for, and if they are there, to praise:

Strong, vivid vocabulary: "You chose a really interesting word to describe that monster - ferocious."

Idea development: "You described how the lizard's tongue works really clearly. At first I couldn't understand how a tongue can smell, but this sentence helps."

Audience awareness: "This introduction really grabbed my attention."

Organization: "Nice transition here: 'On the other hand.' That's a good way to show that you're going to talk about a different side of the issue."

Attempts at sophisticated construction: "Is that a semicolon? That's a pretty advanced punctuation mark. I like to see you trying new things with your writing."

If you want to help your child improve his spelling, keep assignments that contain errors in a folder. Later in the year, after a certain kind of word has been taught - say, the difference between there, their, and they're - have your child go through the folder and see if they can catch some old mistakes with this set of words.

Rest assured, teachers still care very much about spelling. They just recognize that learning other skills - harder, more complex skills - often works best when those skills get a student's full attention. Single instruments first, then the whole orchestra.
Reference:
Kolodziej, N.J., & Columba, L. (2005). Invented spelling: Guidelines for parents. Reading Improvement, 42 (4), 212-223.

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Why is my kid allowed to make spelling mistakes?

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"Last week, my son brought home a stack of papers from his first-grade class. Some of them had obvious spelling errors, but no one had marked them wrong. What's the deal? Why don't teachers seem to care about spelling anymore?"

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A playful approach to learning means more imagination and exploration

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A playful approach to learning means more imagination and exploration

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A playful approach to learning means more imagination and exploration

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We shouldn’t save play for the playground.

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The decline of play in preschoolers — and the rise in sensory issues - The Washington Post

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The decline of play in preschoolers — and the rise in sensory issues - The Washington Post

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Here is a new post from pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom, author of a number of popular posts on this blog, including "Why so many kids can't sit still in school today," as well as " The right - and surprisingly wrong - ways to get kids to sit still in class" and " How schools ruined recess." Hanscom is the founder of TimberNook, a nature-based development program designed to foster creativity and independent play outdoors in New England.

By Angela Hanscom

I still recall the days of preschool for my oldest daughter. I remember wanting to desperately enrich her life in any way possible - to give her an edge before she even got to formal schooling. I put her in a preschool that was academic in nature - the focus on pre-reading, writing, and math skills. At home, I bought her special puzzles, set up organized play dates with children her age, read to her every night, signed her up for music lessons, put her in dance, and drove her to local museums. My friends and I even did "enrichment classes" with our kids to practice sorting, coloring, counting, numbers, letters, and yes....even to practice sitting! We thought this would help prepare them for kindergarten.
[Why so many kids can't sit still in school today]
Like many other American parents, I had an obsession: academic success for my child. Only, I was going about it completely wrong. Yes, my daughter would later go on to test above average with her academic skills, but she was missing important life skills. Skills that should have been in place and nurtured during the preschool years. My wake-up call was when the preschool teacher came up to me and said, "Your daughter is doing well academically. In fact, I'd say she exceeds expectations in these areas. But she is having trouble with basic social skills like sharing and taking turns." Not only that, but my daughter was also having trouble controlling her emotions, developed anxiety and sensory issues, and had trouble simply playing by herself!

Little did I know at the time, but my daughter was far from being the only one struggling with social and sensory issues at such a young age. This was becoming a growing epidemic. A few years ago, I interviewed a highly respected director of a progressive preschool. She had been teaching preschoolers for about 40 years and had seen major changes in the social and physical development of children in the past few generations.

"Kids are just different," she started to say. When I asked her to clarify, she said, "They are more easily frustrated - often crying at the drop of a hat." She had also observed that children were frequently falling out of their seats "at least three times a day," less attentive, and running into each other and even the walls. "It is so strange. You never saw these issues in the past."

She went on to complain that even though her school was considered highly progressive, they were still feeling the pressure to limit free play more than she would like in order to meet the growing demands for academic readiness that was expected before children entered kindergarten.

Research continues to point out that young children learn best through meaningful play experiences, yet many preschools are transitioning from play-based learning to becoming more academic in nature. A preschool teacher recently wrote to me: "I have preschoolers and even I feel pressure to push them at this young age. On top of that, teachers have so much pressure to document and justify what they do and why they do it, the relaxed playful environment is compromised. We continue to do the best we can for the kid's sake, while trying to fit into the ever-growing restraints we must work within."

As parents and teachers strive to provide increasingly organized learning experiences for children (as I had once done), the opportunities for free play - especially outdoors is becoming less of a priority. Ironically, it is through active free play outdoors where children start to build many of the foundational life skills they need in order to be successful for years to come.

In fact, it is before the age of 7 years - ages traditionally known as "pre-academic" - when children desperately need to have a multitude of whole-body sensory experiences on a daily basis in order to develop strong bodies and minds. This is best done outside where the senses are fully ignited and young bodies are challenged by the uneven and unpredictable, ever-changing terrain.

Preschool years are not only optimal for children to learn through play, but also a critical developmental period. If children are not given enough natural movement and play experiences, they start their academic careers with a disadvantage. They are more likely to be clumsy, have difficulty paying attention, trouble controlling their emotions, utilize poor problem-solving methods, and demonstrate difficulties with social interactions. We are consistently seeing sensory, motor, and cognitive issues pop up more and more in later childhood, partly because of inadequate opportunities to move and play at an early age.

What is our natural instinct as adults when issues arise? To try and fix the problem that could have been prevented in the first place. When children reach elementary school, we practice special breathing techniques, coping skills, run social skill groups, and utilize special exercises in an attempt to "teach" children how to be still and to improve focus.

However, these skills shouldn't have to be taught, but something that was developed at a young age in the most natural sense - through meaningful play experiences.
[How schools ruined recess]
If children were given ample opportunities to play outdoors every day with peers, there would be no need for specialized exercises or meditation techniques for the youngest of our society. They would simply develop these skills through play. That's it. Something that doesn't need to cost a lot of money or require much thought. Children just need the time, the space, and the permission to be kids.

Let the adult-directed learning experiences come later. Preschool children need to play!

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The decline of play in preschoolers - and the rise in sensory issues

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Here is a new post from pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom, author of a number of popular posts on this blog, including "Why so many kids can't sit still in school today," as well as "The right - and surprisingly wrong - ways to get kids to sit still in class" and "How schools ruined [...]

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Teaching Kids to Love Reading: 3 Strategies That Work

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Teaching Kids to Love Reading: 3 Strategies That Work

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If you're an elementary teacher, you know that the most daunting and wonderful part of the job is opening the world of books and reading to students. What a responsibility! And what a delight to introduce children to favorite characters, great literature, and big questions around the world and our place in it.

The task can be overwhelming, but there are some simple, research-based strategies that work.

1. First, kids must listen to great stories every day.

It might sound obvious, but reading aloud rich, diverse texts is the single best thing you can do to help your students become readers.

When children listen to great stories, they're exposed to new vocabulary, grammar, and modes of fluency. But even more importantly, they begin to see how words construct meaning in the world around us. Whether students arrive in your classroom unable to read the alphabet or already reading chapter books, reading aloud offers the opportunity to capture students' imaginations and to introduce them to quality fiction and nonfiction.

In the primary grades, reading aloud provides equity and access to rich texts, but it also helps nurture social-emotional skills, as students learn to listen to your words, connect stories to their own emotional lives, and discuss books with friends.

Here are some of our favorite books to read aloud in kindergarten and first grade; we also love the short stories available in the Junior Great Books K-1 program.

2. Second, we must invite students to wonder.

Wonder is at the heart of a deep and meaningful relationship with reading. This is true for a kindergartener or someone working on a PhD in English literature. When we wonder about what we read, we ask questions -questions about the text, about ourselves, and about the wider world.

So how do we encourage wonder at the primary level? We can start by modeling our own questions. What is the story about? How did the story make you feel? What did the story make you think of? What is the character thinking?

Additionally, we can try simple activities that encourage perspective-taking and questioning. For example, the Shared Inquiry method encourages students in grades K-1 to act out small parts of the story. When students pretend they are wearing too-tight shoes just like the main character does in "Those Shoes," by Maribeth Boelts, they begin to understand and ask questions about how that character is feeling.

Another fun Shared Inquiry activity is choral reading using different tones of voice. When students read aloud the same sentence using a scared, happy, and surprised tone of voice, they begin to understand the tone that best matches the mood of the story.

We also love the idea of starting a "Wonder Wall" or bulletin board where students can post the questions they have about books or stories all year long.

3. Finally, we must encourage kids to share.

Sharing is fundamental to the reading experience, to which any adult reader can attest. What's the first thing you want to do when you finish a great book? Talk with someone about it! Seize onto that instinct, and show kids that what they think and that what their classmates think has real value.

You can do that by taking time for students to share their questions and their opinions, too. For many children, seeing you write their question or opinion down on the board is an a-ha moment-"what I say in this classroom matters." Again, model your own questions, and provide text frames to help children with their thinking. For example, "I liked the part where ______________, because _____________."

Sometimes getting kids to share is all about creating the right atmosphere. We love this classroom "campfire" from Literacy Loving Gals. Imagine circling around it to talk great books with your students!

When students are invited to share what they think, they begin to see how reading and sharing-and eventually, writing-are connected. And that's our goal as early reading teachers, isn't it?
What do you do in your classroom to encourage a love of reading? Have you tried the Shared Inquiry method? You can download a sample K-1 lesson here, if you're curious.

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Teaching Kids to Love Reading: 3 Strategies That Work

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If you're an elementary teacher, you know that the most daunting and wonderful part of the job is opening the world of books and reading to students. What a responsibility! And what a delight to introduce children to favorite characters, great literature, and big questions around the world and our place in it.

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The Links between Literacy, Nature and the Principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach | Technology Rich Inquiry Based Research

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The Links between Literacy, Nature and the Principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach | Technology Rich Inquiry Based Research

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The Links between Literacy, Nature and the Principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach

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By: Diane Kashin, Ed.D, RECE. When I was asked to present a workshop that focused on the links between literacy, nature and the Reggio Emilia Approach at the Reading for the Love of It conference I was thrilled as I have a passion for all three.

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The Knowledge Standing Beside You – Without Windows

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The Knowledge Standing Beside You – Without Windows

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To me, working in the Reggio Way is all about a sense of community. Students learning in a Reggio-inspired classroom need to feel like they belong there, almost like the environment is a second home for them. They need to feel respected, free to express themselves, and safe to take risks and make mistakes. But students aren't the only members of a learning community; teachers need to feel a sense of belonging for the place they work, because school is as relevant and essential to their lives as to those of their students.

As Reggio educators, we tend to focus very heavily on relationships to understand the course of learning. Our observations and documentation are often centered on how students interact with their environment, how students interact with each other, and how they interact with their teachers. When we turn inward, we reflect on teacher-student and teacher-environment relationships, and how they can be honed to better facilitate learning in the classroom.

But in my experience, teacher-teacher relationships somehow have a tendency to fall by the wayside. For a while, I just assumed our school never talked about them because they were the last line-item on the in-service agenda and we always ran out of time. I think some teachers just assume that interactions with their coworker automatically improve with the passage of time, so they aren't worth discussing. The most likely reason is that teachers just forget sometimes that students aren't the only ones who need to be shown respect and affection.

Over time, it has become apparent to me that teacher-teacher relationships are the start and the end of the cycle of learning. They are the bond upon which students can start to form classroom expectations, and the glue that holds schools and childcare facilities together in difficult times. The relationships teachers have with one another form the foundation upon which the ECE profession can grow and improve, but also the framework by which we can grow to love our profession more with each passing day.

My co-teachers and director contain an incredible wealth of information about teaching practices, educational theory, business expertise, and practical life experience that is at my disposal every day. And while that is useful to me, they have something that is far more important to me in my growth as an educator. They have lived experience, and they have an intimate knowledge of the context in which I am an educator.

When they make a suggestion, whether I agree with them or not, I can be confident that they are making that suggestion with the specific framework and inner workings of our classroom in mind. They know our students, they know our schedule, and they know the expectations established by our community of learners. My teaching partners have an intimate understanding of me as a teacher, including my strengths and weaknesses. In many ways, my coworkers don't make suggestions to me; they make suggestions for me. This intimacy and implicit understanding of a learning community is the backbone of Reggio-inspired practices like progettazione. It is so complex that in some schools, they have a pedagogista/o whose entire job is to observe and advise teachers to help them and their students continue to grow. Face-to-face discussions with my coworkers are how I metabolize pie-in-the-sky ideas into real, grounded solutions that fit our program and our students. My co-teachers inspire and comfort me, and sometimes crush my enthusiasm when my ideas are impractical or ridiculous. In many ways, they create a constant ebb and flow of innovation, implementation, and reflection that is organic and profoundly personal.

Additionally, my coworkers have the insight to advise me in not just my teaching practice, but also my life as it relates to being a teacher. They can shed light on the difficulties of being a new parent and an educator. They can share their experiences with burnout, and offer up advice for potential next steps in the field for me and my family. My teaching partner has been working in the field for so long, and has operated in such a variety of positions in diverse facilities, that her word is gospel to me when she chooses to voice concerns for the way I do things or reflect on the trajectory of the field of ECE. I can be confident that, when she has an idea or suggests a course of action, she is never shooting from the hip; she is grounding her assessment in immense practical experience and specific, contextualized knowledge of the learning community she is an integral part of.

But beneath the professional boons my coworkers provide to me, there is an social-emotional relevance that cannot be understated. Especially for those working with younger students, it is vitally important for teachers to establish care routines that help students adequately adjust to their learning environments. Co-teachers, sometimes unintentionally, do the same for one another. My teaching partner and I have care routines for each other that are sometime subtle and sometimes not. A mug of coffee in the morning, an offer to change what promises to be the most raucous diaper of the day, or even something as simple as a chipper "Good morning" can be enough to make a coworker feel nurtured. The benefits of happy teachers are multiplied in the classroom as well. Children are observant and many understand adult relationships better than we may realize. Visibly stressful interactions between teachers can have a negative impact on students, but the opposite is also true. When teachers are friendly (sometimes even goofy with one another) it can cultivate a classroom atmosphere that is productive, but also jovial, fun-loving, and familial.

As teachers, we are given a choice. We can explain the importance and impact of positive peer interactions to children until we are blue in the face, or we can channel our energy to providing a powerful example of positive peer interaction: two teachers who are friends. Cooperation, healthy disagreement, and compromise can all be demonstrated on a daily basis when teachers commit to working together in front of the students they teach. In many Reggio-inspired classrooms, there is an underlying understanding among young learners that the greatest asset in their learning journeys is often the person standing next to them, but that understanding is not specific to young learners.

The truth is that teachers are and always will be another teacher's greatest resource.

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To me, working in the Reggio Way is all about a sense of community. Students learning in a Reggio-inspired classroom need to feel like they belong there, almost like the environment is a second home for them. They need to feel respected, free to express themselves, and safe to take risks and make mistakes.

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A Case for Migratory Materials – Without Windows

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A Case for Migratory Materials – Without Windows

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Most preschool classrooms have "centers," and ours is no exception. In our inside space, we have an area for pretend play, an area for art, an area for reading and literacy exploration, an area for science, and an area for engineering, physics, and construction. We do our best to make sure that each of these centers stays fresh by rotating and introducing materials on a regular basis. Because we also incorporate elements of Responsive Classroom in our practice, we sit with the students and discuss how we all think each new material should be used, where it should live, and how to treat it with respect.

But for our students (and many other preschool students all over the world, I suspect), learning materials are made to migrate. Like coastal driftwood or Canadian geese, the temperament of the students can sometimes engender materials moving seamlessly from one area to the next, from inside to outside, and from outside to inside. Sometimes children move one block at a time. Other times they take an entire basket of markers into the reading center, and chaos ensues.

As a meticulous individual who loves all things to be in their place, migratory materials are a great source of frustration for me. I often find myself repeating phrases like, "Remember, the blocks stay in the block center," and "please make sure the paint ends up on the canvas, not your hands." Somewhere in the back of my mind, the learning environment and materials it contains are the final bastion holding the forces of chaos at bay; as long as things stay in the general area they belong, classroom cleanup will never get out of hand and order will prevail.

But I often remind myself that the environment isn't prepared for me; it is prepared by me for the students to freely explore and engage their unfettered curiosity. Centers are ultimately artificial. Transporting is a commonly recognized schema of learning, and as such it is a way children exert agency on the world around them. Rearranging the classroom and the learning materials they come in contact with isn't a purposeful disruption; it is a genuine interest of many of my younger students. My efforts to "maintain control" might make my job easier in the short term, but they are in many ways a direct contradiction of my commitment to respect the child as an educator working in the Reggio Way.

Moreover, learning isn't geographic. Some of my students do wear the dress-up clothes in our indoor pretend play area. But just as many of them go out to the sand garden, sit down, invite their friends to bury their legs, and announce to the world that they are a mermaid. Both are valid examples of pretend play. Likewise, counting, sorting, and arithmetic happen in the middle of the woods as often as they do in the classroom.

Telling children that investigations into literacy live in the book center tacitly conveys the assumption that literacy doesn't live anywhere else, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Mathematics, science, literacy, physics, and imaginative play aren't centers in a classroom, they are pervasive forces that codify the world, and they exist in delicate harmony with one another. It is my opinion that children who find productive alternative uses for materials shouldn't be restricted, but instead encouraged to pursue their avenues of ingenuity for as long as they are willing and able. After all, their interpretation of how the materials should be used is often a better reflection of their learning needs than anything we come up with.

Asserting the distinct boundaries of these learning areas also perpetuates another myth, namely that pretend play, art, math, science, and literacy are always distinct from one another. While distinct centers might exist in the classroom, their barriers are virtually non-existent in the real world. The truth is that all disciplines are hopelessly intertwined, so much so that it is often impossible to learn one without another. Designing and constructing a building is as much about aesthetics as it is about engineering and physics. Similarly, any painter will agree that art is rife with core concepts of mathematics, such as bilateral symmetry and the golden ratio. Dimitri A. Christakis's study titled "Effect of Block Play on Language Acquisition and Attention in Toddlers: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial" directly explores the connection between linguistic development and block play in young children.

Although it might not always seem to be the case, exerting excessive control over the environment disrupts and discourages learning opportunities more often than it cultivates them. I'll be the first to admit that the urge to maintain a pristine environment is not an easy one to shake, but it is undoubtedly the right decision to embrace a more fluid understanding of materials. The development of children, especially the manner in which they acquire information, isn't a simple formula. As teachers, we can't produce the exact lessons we want by controlling the variables and introducing the perfect set of vectors. When teachers introduce something new into the learning environment, we can't know what effect it might have on the students. Trying to preempt or channel their reactions is not only futile, but also obfuscates the free and unhinged learning that happens in a beautifully assembled classroom.

A little bit of chaos is sometimes exactly what is required for true inspiration to occur. Sanding colored marker off of shelves, tripping over block piles, and erasing pencil drawings from the pages of library books are frustrations in my life, but they pale in comparison to the joys I get to experience on a daily basis. Watching two good friends laughing while they enthusiastically engage in collaborative mural painting is worth cleaning a little paint off the ground. Seeing a student napping with his hand still inside a vampire bat puppet makes me glad that I didn't sternly enforce cleanup time. Watching a group of children with shovels attempting to excavate a plastic horse from a block of ice invites me to consider how the horse got outside and into the water in the first place. Emptying countless pairs of rubber boots filled with mulch/mud/water/rocks/soil lets me know that my students love the Earth enough to attempt to take it home with them.

Teachers and students have to live on the wild side from time to time. If those materials want to migrate, sometimes you just have to let them.

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Most preschool classrooms have "centers," and ours is no exception. In our inside space, we have an area for pretend play, an area for art, an area for reading and literacy exploration, an area for science, and an area for engineering, physics, and construction. We do our best to make sure that each of these...

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How to Raise a Reader - Books Guides - The New York Times

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How to Raise a Reader - Books Guides - The New York Times

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After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It’s Time to Throw Out the Playbook – Education Rickshaw

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After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It’s Time to Throw Out the Playbook – Education Rickshaw

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In looking back at my parents' education in the 1950s and 60s, and my own education in the 1990s and 2000s, I worry sometimes that despite the huge advances that we've seen in technology, not much has changed when it comes to how we view learning and how we design learning environments. The transmission model of education is still the name of the game, although in some circles there are signs of its erosion.

I would like to take you on a journey in this post, starting from the 1950s banking model (Freire, 1968) of instructional design, before comparing it to my own schooling experiences as a digital native at the turn of the century. Then, finally, I would like to share my vision for C21 learning, and propose some ways that we can move forward so that we are meeting the needs of today.

When my parents went to school....

In each of these infographics, students are shown as (S) and teachers as (T). The important focus in each of these images is the direction of the arrow. By looking at where the arrow originates and where it is pointed, we can ask ourselves, Who is doing the thinking? Who is actively using language? Who is leading? What is the relationship between the student and the teacher? And since learning is the ultimate goal, Is learning happening? and Is this how students best learn?

In an industrial-age classroom, with a teacher-centered/teacher directed, one-size-fits-all approach, the arrow always points from the teacher to the student. The directionality of the traditional teaching arrow doesn't differentiate to allow for students to learn from any source but the teacher and the resources prescribed by the teacher. The roles are clearly defined: It is the teacher's job to create memorable lessons, and the student's job to remember them whether or not they are memorable.

The only positive spin I can put on the 20th century compliance model is that learning can potentially happen despite the teacher's illusion of control. My mom, for example, was a Deaf student learning in a 1960's hearing world. She recalls how she would resort to sneaking notes to ask for help from her peers before being caught and punished by her teacher. According to her, and countless other students with similar experiences, it was the help of peers or an adult tutor that saved them from what could potentially have been a lost education. Of course, reconceptualizing the entire learning model to one that allows for personalization and multi-directional dialogue would have done the trick as well.

Now, if you think that things got better for us millennials circa Y2K, I am sad to report that by the time school started for me in 1992, the directionality of the arrow had barely changed at all.

When I went to school....

Let me paint a picture of what it was like when Stephanie and I attended school. In almost all of my classes growing up, teachers put us in groups of 4-6 desks like those depicted above. There were 6-8 iMacs collecting dust around the perimeter of the classroom, and class sets of simple word processing laptops on wheels. We had book bags and class libraries, and we took brain breaks and played learning games, too. There was an increased understanding on the value of pastoral care and differentiation, although they didn't call it that. Despite an overall appearance of progress, the teacher still held the cards. The direction of the arrow didn't change; It still went from teacher to student to nothing.

I don't want to devalue the work that was being done by a handful of forward-thinking teachers in my life. If it weren't for them, I wouldn't have entered the profession. But for the majority of my experience, the focus was on making traditional teaching work for the 21st century, not on shifting the paradigm. Yes, my generation's instructional methods included "turn and talk", for example, where we were asked to turn to a partner and mindlessly babble fake discussion, with one eye on the teacher to make sure she wasn't coming around. Then, when "talk" time was up, we would just share what we were already going to say before the exercise began. This is how we did "discussions"; We were allowed to talk to a partner for 15 seconds, and then those selected by the teacher were allowed to share before the teacher took back the reigns once more.

Again, the arrows of my education were not much different than the linear, teacher-controlled, unidirectional arrow that formed the education of my parents' generation, and the generations of organized schooling that existed for 100 years before. In order to truly reject the pedagogy of the 20th century, which may have been adequate for the time, we literally have to make a 180 ° turn and run the other way.

My dream for school....

It's time to change the direction of the arrow by for once and for all turning it around and allowing it to originate from the student.Imagine a classroom where students are the ones driving the learning and are empowered to pursue things that matter to them. In the infographic above we see multiple modalities being employed by these students as students are accessing human and digital resources to drive their own learning. In a 21st century learning model, learning extends beyond the classroom walls, and students are exchanging, discussing, questioning, reflecting and making connections anywhere, anytime. Most importantly, students are inspired and empowered to act, rather than sit back and have the knowledge brought to them.

Ideal classrooms always change, are a mess & have no teacher desk. They encourage interactions & personalization. #africaed #kicslearns pic.twitter.com/mnAPoa6hJw

- Bradley Arnold (@leybradly) September 14, 2017

This learning is so nonlinear, publicly shared, and student-driven that there is no silver bullet for how to achieve this in your classroom overnight. I'm still learning and reflecting on how best we might do this, and I don't pretend to have arrived the proverbial mountaintop of understanding. Regardless, here are some things I've tried in my class to change the direction of the arrow, with a related blog post explaining below:

With the world of knowledge now available at our students' fingertips, and in a time when we're certain that the workforce of the future is going to look completely different from what it does now, it's time to reject the status quo of how we design learning opportunities for our students. Seeing as we are already well into the 21st Century, my hope is that once and for all we put an end to the 20th century mindset of the teacher as the keeper of knowledge and our students as the passive consumers of information.

- Zach Groshell @mrzachg
You're welcome to join our facebook group, Over-posting Educators.

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After 100 Years of the Same Teaching Model It's Time to Throw Out the Playbook

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In looking back at my parents' education in the 1950s and 60s, and my own education in the 1990s and 2000s, I worry sometimes that despite the huge advances that we've seen in technology, not much has changed when it comes to how we view learning and how we design learning environments.

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Harnessing the power of your classroom library

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Harnessing the power of your classroom library

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Monday morning is team meeting day. Ten personalities, ten different jobs. How can we ensure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute and feels comfortable doing so?
Running meetings is not my strong suit. Do we need to "run" meetings. Would it be more democratic to rotate the chair or would that simply make participants feel even more uncomfortable?

I would like to gather ideas here and share my experiences trying to make necessary meetings useful and engaging and making the most of the strengths of every team member.

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Harnessing the power of your classroom library

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Monday morning is team meeting day. Ten personalities, ten different jobs. How can we ensure that everybody has an opportunity to contribute and feels comfortable doing so? Running meetings is not my strong suit. Do we need to "run" meetings. Would it be more democratic to rotate the chair or would that simply make participants feel even more uncomfortable?

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Literacy and Mathematics | Perspectives | UWCSEA | International school in Singapore

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Literacy and Mathematics | Perspectives | UWCSEA | International school in Singapore

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UWCSEA | International school in Singapore

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Points of View

In the Infant School, we value each child's natural desire to play and learn. A child's curiosity leads to learning through experimentation and discovery, and play is a vehicle for this inquiry. This play, coupled with intentional teaching and a purposeful environment, means learning is planned for, listened to, documented, and analysed. Teaching and learning in the East Infant School are guided by our ' Image of the Child' ( Dunia, December 2016), carefully articulated curriculum, and Learning Principles, which set the conditions for learning to happen.

In Literacy and Mathematics, students engage with authentic learning experiences that help them develop the foundational skills needed throughout their education. While some might imagine the teaching of Literacy and Mathematics to be quite different, we have found that they share many similarities. Both strive for comprehension, fluency and accuracy. Both invite students to explain their thinking and process, to be open to others' ideas, and to recognise that there are often many ways to answer a question, build a theory, or find a solution.

Literacy

Literacy education focuses on the essential skills of writing, reading, listening, and speaking. Much of writing in the early years involves storytelling and writing about the real world. Students' first 'written' stories are often represented as mark making. Making marks, 'inventing' spelling, and creative illustration are signs that the concept of the written word is forming and meaning-making is happening. As the skills of writing develop, marks take on characteristics of the written word. Teachers build on children's understanding of text, the writing process, and each child's own image as a writer. Children are given choice in what they write, time to practice, and feedback as they begin to own their writing.

A love of reading is nurtured through a range of experiences. Decoding text is only part of the reader's experience; much time is spent discussing books, authors, and the meaning behind texts. Reading aloud to students happens daily, and the children see themselves as readers well before decoding the first word. They pick up books, tell stories, and use illustrations to understand character, setting and plot. Early readers are figuring out how books work and exploring texts to make sense of the written word. As with writing, teachers facilitate the 'image of the child as a reader' in a classroom culture that values reading and gives each child the confidence to take risks.

Listening and speaking skills are vital for learning to read and write. Students have opportunities to respond to texts, talk about their learning, and articulate their thinking. Children are encouraged to listen to the ideas and opinions of others and share their own thinking and understandings. Students learn to interact appropriately with others, share their opinions, receive and respond to feedback, and show respect and consideration as they collaborate with others.

Mathematics

In order to develop a deep sustainable understanding in Mathematics, we strive to ensure that children go through three stages: concrete or 'doing', pictorial or 'seeing' and finally, abstract or symbolic. Students come to understand the concepts through activities that develop skills in number sense, measurement, patterning, and geometry.

Number sense includes an understanding of symbols, counting, patterns, quantity and operations (+ - x ÷). Students require an understanding of how numbers can be taken apart and put together in different ways. In order to have strong number sense, skills such as estimation, problem solving and perseverance are essential. Children have access to a variety of tools and materials which help to develop and deepen their mathematical understandings. Collaborative number games are used for consolidation and to encourage mathematical discussions. Being able to articulate their thinking and process is essential.

Through measurement learning experiences students use comparative language to build, create and experiment. In Infant classes, we typically use non-standard units to measure length, weight, volume and area. A water table supports learning about volume, while weighing scales allow children to compare and measure differences in weight.

Provocations for learning patterning encourage students to identify, build and explain patterns using a variety of media. Students are always looking for patterns - in language, art, nature and numbers. Everyday items such as stickers, blocks, and pebbles as well as numbers, are used to build this understanding.

Through geometry in the form of block play, students explore concepts of measurement, balance, shape, pattern, size, adding, subtracting and spatial awareness. Block play allows students to freely explore and manipulate construction materials, which helps build the foundation for many future mathematics-related skills and understandings.

So when you walk into our Infant learning spaces and see 'play' happening, know that students are inquiring and investigating their world and learning the habits of learning. They are learning to be social, to be independent, and to solve problems. Whether we call it Reggio-inspired, play-based, or child-centred, we are proud to say that our children are learning through play.

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Points of View In the Infant School, we value each child's natural desire to play and learn. A child's curiosity leads to learning through experimentation and discovery, and play is a vehicle for this inquiry. This play, coupled with intentional teaching and a purposeful environment, means learning is planned for, listened to, documented, and analysed.

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Image of the Child | Perspectives | UWCSEA | International school in Singapore

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Image of the Child | Perspectives | UWCSEA | International school in Singapore

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UWCSEA | International school in Singapore

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Everything that takes place within the Infant School on East Campus, in terms of teaching and learning, building relationships, even professional development for the staff, all stems from one overriding factor - our Image of the Child.

Our Image of the Child is rooted in a firm belief in a child with unlimited potential who is eager to interact with and contribute to the world, rather than seeing that child as an empty vessel waiting to be filled with knowledge by teachers. A child who arrives on our doorstep in August brings an enormous amount of existing understanding and knowledge and so many experiences ready to share.

The idea of the Image of the Child has come through our ongoing research in recent years of the Reggio Emilia approach. Our decision to create our own Image of the Child was a direct response to the work of Loris Malaguzzi (1920-1994), founder of the Reggio Emilia approach. Above all, he believed "Each one of you has inside yourself an image of the child that directs you as you begin to relate to a child. This theory within you pushes you to behave in certain ways; it orients you as you talk to the child, listen to the child, observe the child. It is very difficult for you to act contrary to this internal image. For example, if your image is that boys and girls are very different from one another, you will behave differently in your interactions with each of them."

About Reggio Emilia

In educational terms, the northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia has a firmly established worldwide reputation for forward thinking and excellence in its approach to Early Childhood education. It embraces what is called a socio-constructivist model in that children co-construct their theories and develop understanding through the relationships that they build with other people, their peers and teachers, and also the environment.

The approach is distinguished by a deeply embedded commitment to the role of research in teaching and learning. Much attention is given to detailed observation and documentation of learning and, significantly, the learning process takes priority over the final product.

It is a model that demonstrates a strong relationship between school and community. After the Second World War, it was the parents and citizens of Reggio Emilia who, in a show of collective responsibility and the desire to create a better society for their children, occupied a disused building and turned it into the first school. This and the other schools that followed were, quite literally, built by the people. From the start, the schools have been committed to progressive thinking that focuses on the child. For these reasons the Reggio schools have attracted significant global interest and received international accolades.
The education that Reggio schools provide is the result of a long and gradual process that continues to evolve. In the East Infant School, we are still very much in the early stages of our own process, as we explore what it means to be "Reggio inspired." We believe many of the associated elements help us to articulate the UWCSEA Learning Principles in the Early Years.

Constructing our Image of the Child

Our Image of the Child is something we have constructed together as an Infant School staff and is, ultimately, the basis of everything we are striving for and everything we believe is important about an Early Years education.

We hope to promote an Image of the Child as a strong, capable protagonist in his or her own learning. A child who is driven by curiosity and imagination, a child who listens and is listened to and, significantly, a child who is valued.

We value the contributions of the children in our care and, as much as possible, we want them to be a part of co-constructing the learning in the classrooms. We listen to what they have to say. We observe how they interact with each other and with provocations in the environment and we use this to guide teaching and learning. When we listen to the children, we are then able to identify concepts and skills that are appropriate as next steps.

The learning environment

Our Image of the Child also continues to have a profound impact on our learning environment across the Infant School. The physical environment of the Reggio schools is one of the most well known aspects of the approach and, perhaps, one of the most misunderstood.

It is a common misconception that to 'do Reggio' entails whitewashing walls and introducing elements such as mirrors, three-dimensional pyramids or light tables into the classrooms...and that is it. Of course, you will find those things in an Infant classroom at East but the reality is far more complex.

We strive to create learning spaces that invite and promote research and autonomous discovery, both for individual children and for groups of children working together. Everything we set up is done with intentionality: a desire to provoke the children's thinking; to build on their existing understanding or ongoing dialogue we hear in and around the classroom.

We believe the physical environment of our school is much more than a simple container for teaching and learning. Instead, the environment is a central component of learning. This is why Reggio educators often refer to the environment as 'the third teacher.'

When you visit a K1, K2 or Grade 1 classroom at East, you will see a flexible space with different arrangements of furniture and resources. You will see evidence of the children's voice on displays or in blog postings as we want to make their thinking visible. You will see interesting and creative provocations, with a variety of resources being used and reused in inviting ways. You will see spaces for endless dialogue, nooks and crannies for children to have conversations and interact in different sized groups. You will not see 22 children sitting in rows at 22 desks!

Again, quoting Malaguzzi, "The environment you construct around you and the children also reflects this image you have about the child. There's a difference between the environment that you are able to build based on a preconceived image of the child and the environment that you can build that is based on the child you see in front of you - the relationship you build with the child, the games you play. An environment that grows out of your relationship with the child is unique and fluid."

Earlier this year, we decided it was time to share our Image of the Child (at right) and it is now displayed throughout the Infant School and referenced in communications with the wider community. As we continue to integrate the principles of Reggio into the environment and curriculum of the Infant School, this image will inform each step and support us in creating a school recognises, respects, supports and nurtures each child.

Our Image of the Child
Children are unique. They are capable, curious and insightful and able to express this through many and varied ways. We value what they have to share and offer and we seek to work together with them to develop shared understandings.

Listening
Every child who comes to us brings unique, rich and complex understandings of the world they have already formed and are constantly reforming based on their individual families, experiences, cultures, relationships and thoughts, which we seek to listen to and honour. They have hopes, dreams, history, knowledge and understanding that they can share with and offer others.

Learning
Children express and create their knowledge, understanding, feelings and ideas in a wide variety of ways, which we seek to celebrate, understand and enable.

Children learn from the perspective of those around them and through collaboration.

Seeking to make their understanding visible honours their thinking and allows us to listen and have dialogue with the children as learners.

Our curriculum represents important shared language we can use in dialogue, but we should also be willing to be surprised, open to possibilities in children's thinking and the ways they make meaning of the world.

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Everything that takes place within the Infant School on East Campus, in terms of teaching and learning, building relationships, even professional development for the staff, all stems from one overriding factor - our Image of the Child.

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Articles and Resources: Reading and Phonics

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Articles and Resources: Reading and Phonics

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6 Myths About Kindergarten Literacy Instruction – Heinemann Publishing – Medium

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6 Myths About Kindergarten Literacy Instruction – Heinemann Publishing – Medium

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By Heidi Anne E. Mesmer & Marcia Invernizzi

"No time for play . . . literacy instruction in kindergarten is destroying childhood!" the headline in the local paper screamed. The article went on to describe days filled with tedious assessments, eliminated playground periods, and administrators insisting that "fun" be removed from the daily schedule. The article ended with a series of "educational experts" offering an alarming anecdote - remove literacy instruction from the kindergarten curriculum entirely!?

We need kindergarten reform, but the call to take literacy instruction out of kindergarten reflects a deep misunderstanding of exactly what good literacy instruction is at the kindergarten level and why it is essential. In our discussions with parents, administrators, and schools we see six pervasive myths.

1. Myth: Kindergarten literacy instruction is teaching reading or pushing down the first-grade curriculum.

Fact: Kindergarten literacy instruction is responsively teaching young children the many facets that support their literacy development in many areas.

In a recent opinion editorial, a mother and columnist asserted she did not want her son to learn to read in kindergarten. One of the most pervasive misconceptions held by non-educators is that the words literacy and reading refer to the same thing. When K-5 educators use the word literacy they are referring to an umbrella term that includes listening, speaking, reading, and writing, as well as motivation, comprehension, and vocabulary (Frankel et al. 2016). (This is one reason the International Literacy Association, an organization of over 41,000 educational professionals, replaced the word reading with literacy in its name.)

One of the most pervasive misconceptions held by non-educators is that the words literacy and reading refer to the same thing.

In kindergarten, literacy instruction prepares children to learn to read, as it has for decades. It includes letter names and letter sounds; concepts about print (e.g., left to right, letters make up words); phonological awareness (e.g., recognizing rhymes, beginning sounds); writing; comprehending stories and information read aloud; learning new vocabulary; and, toward the end of the year, reading some simple words and easily memorized stories (usually with less than fifty words total). This multifaceted approach is consistent with the standards of all fifty states and the Common Core State Standards (NGA & CCSSO 2010).

Although letter instruction is important, it is not the only facet of instruction, and it should not be isolated from meaningful print and language. (Invernizzi & Tortorelli 2013; Justice & Pullen 2003; McKay & Teale 2015; Neuman, Copple, Bredekamp 2000). Children must understand the purpose of letters. When they watch a teacher point to words as she reads a big book or write spoken words on chart paper, they learn why letter knowledge is useful and powerful! These activities illustrate the alphabetic principle - that printed words are a way to write down speech and that letters represent speech sounds.

2. Myth: Kindergarten literacy instruction is developmentally inappropriate.
Fact: High-quality literacy instruction in kindergarten is developmentally appropriate and backed by decades of solid research.
Most kindergarten teachers do not reject literacy instruction but they do reject inappropriate expectations, high-pressure timelines, and meaningless assessments (See Myths 3-5). Unfortunately, the legitimate alarms being sounded about kindergarten could send the pendulum swinging too far in the wrong direction.

Between the 1950s and 1970s educators believed in "reading readiness" - the idea that prior to a certain age children did not possess the needed cognitive and motor skills to be taught to read. Some even claimed that before the mental age of six and a half, instruction was pointless. To this end, schools administered reading readiness tests at the end of kindergarten. These ideas are once again emerging. Yet, in 1966 Dolores Durkin conducted a study disproving this notion. She found there was no such thing as reading readiness and that "pessimistic opinions about the effects of early reading were not corroborated, and . . . early, and nonearly reading children were not markedly dissimilar."

We simply cannot reverse the trend of high-quality literacy instruction in kindergarten. To do so would be devastating to children who depend on public schools for their education.

Today's classrooms reflect the broader idea of "emergent literacy," an approach suggesting that from birth onward, children are developing insights about language, reading, and writing (e.g., oral language, background knowledge, stories, print, vocabulary, verbal reasoning) that support later development (Sulzby & Teale 1989). Thus, all children are "ready" for literacy learning; instruction simply must intersect with what they know and need to learn.

3. Myth: There is no time for play, fun, or social-emotional development.

Fact: Kindergarten literacy instruction should be FUN and engaging!

You are doing it wrong as a kindergarten teacher if literacy instruction does not engage and delight children. High-quality literacy instruction is fun, but like every important endeavor in life, it is challenging as well. (And honestly, optimal challenge is what the human brain craves.) Literacy instruction introduces children to the thrill of recognizing their own name, the excitement of pointing to the words in a nursery rhyme, the delight of learning about pandas, and the exhilaration of writing a personal message (see McKay & Teale 2015). Furthermore, research shows that literacy elements can be integrated into play centers with blocks, kitchen toys, and dress-up outfits with positive effects on children (Neuman & Roskos 1992).

Literacy instruction need not exclude play, and playful environments need not exclude literacy instruction.

In addition, literacy instruction serves no purpose if children do not develop socially and emotionally. Literacy itself is inherently social; it is about sharing information, stories, and ideas. Thus, kindergarteners must develop empathy, respect, problem solving, patience, and confidence. In fact, the authors of the heavily cited article "Is Kindergarten the New First Grade?"write, "Academic instruction in early-childhood classrooms is often framed as inherently at odds with 'child-centered,' 'developmentally appropriate,' or 'play-based' practices. This presumed dichotomy - that preschool and kindergarten must either be geared toward play and socioemotional development or focused on rigorous academic instruction - is false." (Bassok, Claessens, Engel 2014).

Fact: Kindergarten literacy instruction cannot be the same for everyone.
For many kindergarteners (and not just those who struggle) there is a mismatch between the instruction and what they need. In November at one school, a kindergarten child was being referred to special education because she did not know enough letter sounds and was "so far behind." Yet a tutor worked with this child for only nine hours and she learned 75 percent of the alphabet! In another classroom, a student reading on a third-grade level was not "allowed" to read in school because it was not developmentally appropriate. What could be more developmentally inappropriate than this child sitting on the rug singing the alphabet song? In fact, a recent study found that kindergartners can differ in their literacy and mathematical knowledge by as much as one standard deviation (Reardon, 2013). Even English language learners are not a homogeneous group (Ford et al., 2013).

The problem is not literacy instruction but a one-size-fits-all approach.

Because kindergarteners are so different, literacy instruction must be different, for both the child reading Junie B. Jones and the one who does not know his letters (Tomlinson, 2000). To differentiate, teachers must know what children need to learn and must have a time and a place to teach them. This means they must use formative assessments to create small instructional groups - both pivotal in improving literacy outcomes for children, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds (Taylor et al. 2003; Walpole et al. 2004).

5. Myth: More testing OR no testing.
Fact: High-quality literacy instruction is driven by certain types of literacy tests.
Teachers in the United States are legitimately concerned that testing is squeezing out instruction. However, certain types of measures, formative and screening, must not be eliminated. Formative or diagnostic testsare those that guide instruction by telling teachers what children need to be taught. For example, almost all teachers start the year by finding out which letters and letter sounds children know. This information supports targeted instruction so time is not wasted teaching information a child already knows.

We must reduce superfluous assessments, but abandoning best assessment practices - formative and screening tests - would be detrimental to the nation's most at-risk children.

In the late 1990s into the 2000s, we made huge leaps as a nation in the area of early literacy. In essence, we discovered early intervention is key to preventing reading failure (Clay 1985; Slavin, Karweit, & Wasik, 1994; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Torgesen, 2004). If a young, at-risk learner can be identified early in kindergarten, then additional targeted instruction can prevent the child from experiencing reading failure later (Torgesen 2004; Vellutino et al. 1996). To identify children, almost all states use a literacy screening test, a simple measure given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year to identify children who need extra help (Foorman, Fletcher, and Francis 2004; Invernizzi et al. 2004). It works (Invernizzi et al. 2004)!

6. Myth: Other countries are doing kindergarten more effectively than the United States.

Fact: Literacy instruction in the United States is challenging for a number of reasons.

Many times we have heard people compare literacy in the United States to other countries. We like to remind them to be careful about unexamined international comparisons. They might say, "Children in the Netherlands play in kindergarten and learn to read in first grade and they have one of the highest literacy rates around." But this misses the point. In the Netherlands, for example, children go to "kindergarten" the day they turn four years old and they stay for two years (Toll & Van Luit 2014)! The point is that teaching children to "read" is not an isolated, one-year event but the accumulation of much broader literacy instruction that takes place across many years in homes, schools, childcare settings, and communities.

Another factor that impacts literacy learning is the nature of the language. Children who are learning to read simple languages with one-to-one correspondences (e.g., Greek, Finnish) reach levels of almost 100 percent accuracy on word reading as early as mid-first grade (Zeigler & Goswami 2005). In comparison, children learning English only reach levels of 40 percent accuracy by the same point (Ziegler & Goswami 2005). This is not because they are lazy, come from bad homes, have bad teachers, or a poor educational system. It's because they are learning a more complex orthography (spelling system).

What is potentially damaging and inappropriate is an exclusive focus on skill instruction and assessments to the detriment of social-emotional development.

In short, literacy instruction in kindergarten is not damaging or inappropriate. We must provide research-based, preparatory instruction that will support children in becoming literate as soon as they can but not at a sacrifice to psychological or emotional well-being. What is potentially damaging and inappropriate is an exclusive focus on skill instruction and assessments to the detriment of social-emotional development. Also potentially damaging would be the elimination formative and screening assessment practices or adherence to a "readiness" model. We can do it better, but we simply cannot reverse the trend toward providing high-quality literacy instruction in kindergarten. To do so would be devastating to children who depend on public schools for their education.

Heidi Anne E. Mesmer, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Literacy at Virginia Tech. A former third grade teacher, she has held tenure-earning positions for over 17 years and has been with Virginia Tech since 2007. Dr. Mesmer has studied beginning reading materials and text difficulty for her entire career. Her research has appeared Reading Research Quarterly, The Educational Researcher, Reading Teacher, Elementary School Journal, Journal of Literacy Research, and Early Childhood Research Quarterly. She has written and directed 8 grants aimed at improving reading instruction in K-5 classrooms. Her upcoming book, Teaching skills for complex text: Deepening close reading in the Classroomwill be published by Teacher's College Press (2017).

Dr. Mesmer's research was supported by a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship, and an American Educational Research Association/Institute of Education Sciences grant. She is the recipient of the Outreach Award, from the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (2012), the P-12 Outreach Award, School of Education, Virginia Tech (2011), and the Promising Scholar Award, School of Education, Virginia Tech (2009). In 2014 she delivered The George Graham Lecture in Reading for Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

Marcia Invernizzi is the coauthor, with Jennifer Palmer, of No More Phonics and Spelling Worksheets. The book is a part of Heinemann's Not This But Series, edited by Nell K. Duke and Ellin Oliver Keene. In addition to her Heinemann title, Marcia is a coauthor of Words Their Way and twelve other books related to word study. She is the creator and primary author of PALS, the Phonologial Awareness Literacy Screening tool used in many states and a founder of Book Buddies, a tutoring framework for struggling readers in the first and second grades.

The Henderson Professor of Reading Education at the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, Marcia teaches graduate classes for the program areas of reading and teacher education in the department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education. Marcia's research focuses on the role of written word knowledge in literacy development, on reading difficulties, and on formative and diagnostic literacy assessments that can inform instruction. She has received many awards for her teaching and research, including the Curry School of Education's Outstanding Professor Award, and the University of Virginia's Edlich-Henderson Innovator of the Year Award.

References
Bassok, D., Claessens, A., & Engel, M. (2014). The case for the new kindergarten: Challenging and playful. Education Week. Retrieved from edweek. org/ew/articles/2014/06/04/33bassok_ep. h33. html.

Durkin, D. (1966). Children who read early, Two longitudinal studies. Retrieved at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED019107.

Clay, M. M. (1985). The early detection of reading difficulties.

Foorman, B. R., Fletcher, J. M., & Francis, D. J. (2004). Texas primary reading inventory. Texas Educational Agency and the University of Texas System.

Foorman, B.R., Francis, D.J., Fletcher, J.M., Schatschneider, C., and Mehta, P. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 90, 37-55.

Ford, K. L., Cabell, S. Q., Konold, T. R., Invernizzi, M., & Gartland, L. B. (2013). Diversity among Spanish-speaking English language learners: profiles of early literacy skills in kindergarten. Reading and Writing, 26(6), 889-912.

Frankel, K. K., Becker, B. L., Rowe, M. W., & Pearson, P. D. (2016). From" What is Reading?" to What is Literacy? . Journal of Education, 196(3). 7-17.

Invernizzi, M. A., & Tortorelli, L. S. (2013). Phonological awareness and alphabet knowledge: The foundations of early reading. Best Practices in Early Literacy Instructions. New York, NY: Guilfor d.

Invernizzi, M., Sullivan, A., Meier, J., & Swank, L. (2004). Phonological awareness literacy screening for preschool. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia.

Justice, L. M., & Pullen, P. C. (2003). Promising interventions for promoting emergent literacy skills: Three evidence-based approaches. Topics in early childhood special education, 23(3), 99-113.

Palmer, J. L. & Invernizzi, M. (2015). No more phonics and spelling worksheets. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

McKay, R. & Teale, W. H. (2015). No more teaching a letter a week. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School

Officers. (2010a). Common Core State Standards for English language arts and literacy in

history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Washington, DC: Authors. Retrieved from
www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf
Neuman, S. B., & Roskos, K. (1992). Literacy objects as cultural tools: Effects on children's literacy behaviors in play. Reading Research Quarterly, 27, (3), 203-225.

Neuman, S. B., Copple, C., & Bredekamp, S. (2000). Learning to read and write: Developmentally appropriate practices for young children. National Association for the Education of Young Children, 1509 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC (Stock no. 161, $12).

Reardon, S. F. (2013). The widening income achievement gap. Educational Leadership, 70(8), 10-16.

Slavin, R. E., Karweit, N. L., & Wasik, B. A. (1994). Preventing early school failure: Research, policy, and practice. Allyn & Bacon.

Snow, C. E., Burns, M. S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.). (1998). Preventing reading difficulties in young children. National Academies Press.

Sulzberger, E. & Teale, W.H. (Eds.). 1989. Emergent Literacy: Writingand Reading. Ablex Publishing.

Taylor, B. M., Pearson, P. D., Peterson, D. S., & Rodriguez, M. C. (2003). Reading growth in high-poverty classrooms: The influence of teacher practices that encourage cognitive engagement in literacy learning. The Elementary School Journal, 3-28.

Toll, S. W., & Van Luit, J. E. (2014). The developmental relationship between language and low early numeracy skills throughout kindergarten. Exceptional Children, 81(1), 64-78.

Tomlinson, C. A. (2000). Reconcilable differences: Standards-based teaching and differentiation. Educational Leadership, 58(1), 6-13.

Torgesen, J. K. (2004). Avoiding the devastating downward spiral: The evidence that early intervention prevents reading failure. American Educator, 28(3), 6-19.

Torgesen, J.K., Wagner, R.K., Rashotte, C.A., Rose, E., Lindamood, P., Conway, T., et al. (1999). Preventing reading failure in young children with phonological processing disabilities: Group and individual responses to instruction. Journal of Educational Psychology, 91, 579-593.

Vellutino, F. R., Scanlon, D. M., Sipay, E. R., Small, S. G., Chen, A. P., & Denckla, M. B. (1996). Cognitive profiles of difficult-to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers: Early intervention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and experiential deficits as basic causes of specific reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88, (4) (1996): 601.

Walpole, S., Justice, L. M., & Invernizzi, M. A. (2004). Closing the gap between research and practice: Case study of school-wide literacy reform. Reading & writing quarterly, 20(3), 261-283.

Ziegler, J.C., & Gowami, U. Reading Acquisition, Developmental Dyslexia, and Skilled Reading Across Languages: A Psycholinguistic Grain Size Theory. (2005) Psychological Bulletin, 131 (1), 3-29.

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6 Myths About Kindergarten Literacy Instruction - Heinemann Publishing - Medium

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By Heidi Anne E. Mesmer & Marcia Invernizzi "No time for play . . . literacy instruction in kindergarten is destroying childhood!" the headline in the local paper screamed. The article went on to describe days filled with tedious assessments, eliminated playground periods, and administrators insisting that "fun" be removed from the daily schedule.

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Simple Literacy Provocations - Fairy Dust Teaching

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Simple Literacy Provocations - Fairy Dust Teaching

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I know some people get overwhelmed when trying to think of new ideas for provocations. Today I want to share with you some simple ideas for literacy provocations that may spark some new ideas for you! Enjoy!
If you are reading this and wondering what a provocation is, please read Fairy Dust's post: What is a Provocation?
*Note: These provocations are from a Reggio-Inspired Preschool here in Tulsa, OK, Rosa Parks ECEC. These provocations were found in PreK classrooms, ages 4-5.

Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom letter provocation.

An ish and Sky Color provocation, so many possibilities here.

Letter making in sand with paint brushes! There is an alphabet flip book hanging on a ring below.

Using stretch bands to make letters on the homemade Geoboard. You can read the post to learn how to make one of your own here.

Storytelling on the light table!

Inviting children to make their own bear characters using loose parts as a follow-up activity to reading stories about bears.

Mini books to use to write or illustrate their stories.

Pre-made books, writing/drawing materials, as well as stamps for this book making provocation.

This provocation literally calls for the building of letters.

Another way to build letters with blocks.

I love the use of the frame as a work space for the children to build their name puzzle.

I think one of the most important things to remember when setting up any provocation is not to over think it. Children will do what they want to do with the materials. Simply think of what you want them to learn from the experience and what tools they might need to do that.
Oh, and don't forget the books! Share which provocation inspired you the most in the comments!
If you enjoyed the ideas in this post, you will love Fairy Dust Teaching's 2017 Summer Conference!

Click here to join today!

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Simple Literacy Provocations - Fairy Dust Teaching

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I know some people get overwhelmed when trying to think of new ideas for provocations. Today I want to share with you some simple ideas for literacy provocations that may spark some new ideas for you! Enjoy! If you are reading this and wondering what a provocation is, please read Fairy Dust's post: What is a Provocation?

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Children as young as two grouped by ability in English nurseries | Education | The Guardian

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Children as young as two grouped by ability in English nurseries | Education | The Guardian

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Children as young as two, three and four are being divided into groups based on ability and behaviour in classrooms in England, research has found.

About half of the 118 nursery school teachers questioned by researchers grouped their two- to four-year-olds for teaching reading, and a third for maths, with the use of grouping increasing later in primary schools.

"Teachers have concerns about the negative impact of grouping on children's confidence, self-esteem and aspirations, potentially leading to mental health problems," concluded the research team based at University College London's Institute of Education, who were commissioned by the National Education Union (NEU).

About 80% of teachers in reception classes for four- and five-year-olds said they used ability groups to teach phonics - the first stages of reading, linking sounds to letters - while by year 2, 65% of teachers used groups for teaching maths.

The researchers contacted and surveyed about 1,300 teachers and school leaders in English primary and nursery schools. The use of grouping covers all forms of differentiation, including streams, where children are separated into different classes, and setting, where children are grouped within the same class, as well as targeted interventions for specific pupils.

The researchers found the groups were based on factors other than ability alone, including children's friendships, behaviour and concentration levels.

"Our findings suggest that grouping decisions are not made solely on the basis of attainment or perceived ability: issues such as classroom management, the need to balance the number of boys and girls and friendships were also key to grouping decisions," the report says.

It comes as the Ofsted school inspectorate published its own review of reception year teaching, which found "many teachers were devising tasks simply to tick off and record elements of the early learning goals, rather than developing a proper plan".

The NEU research, including surveys of its members and focus groups, found that many children quickly discerned which level of ability groups they had been placed into, despite the efforts of teachers to conceal differences.

Two-thirds of teachers agreed that the children were aware of different ability groups being used, even if seemingly neutral names for each group were applied, such as types of fruit or animals.

"We might call them foxes and rabbits, but they know," one teacher was quoted as saying.

Many teachers involved in the research defended the practice as a necessary response in dealing with children whose abilities varied considerably.

"You have some children who already know all their sounds and everything like that, where you have other children who still can't hear a sound, so it's very difficult to teach those children together," one school leader told the researchers.

Half of the teachers who responded said they believed grouping improved overall attainment.

"I personally think it's better for the children because otherwise your more able children get bored and frustrated, and your less able children just get left behind. So grouping means that you can focus your attention," one school leader said.

Others warned that grouping could limit children at a young age and produce "disenchanted" groups that were more difficult to teach.

"Ability groups can be highly limiting and lead to disruptive behaviour, especially at the lower ability end," one classroom teacher said.

"Grouping this way doesn't particularly boost anyone's confidence and self-esteem - the higher ability compete and feel inferior of each other and ... the lower ability tend to be more disruptive."

Previous research has found that disadvantaged children are more likely to be in lower sets and have less experienced or qualified staff. Boys and children with special needs are also more likely to be placed in lower-ability groups.

Ofsted's report noted that 72% of pupils achieved a good level of development in reception class in 2016, although only 54% of disadvantaged pupils did so.

The minister for children and families, Robert Goodwill, said: "Teachers and early years staff are best placed to make decisions about the teaching methods they use. There is no statutory requirement that suggests children should be grouped by ability.

"We are clear that while assessment is a fundamental part of children's education to measure progress, it should not cause significant stress or anxiety."

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Children as young as two grouped by ability in English nurseries

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Children as young as two, three and four are being divided into groups based on ability and behaviour in classrooms in England, research has found. About half of the 118 nursery school teachers questioned by researchers grouped their two- to four-year-olds for teaching reading, and a third for maths, with the use of grouping increasing later in primary schools.

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Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play | Aeon Essays

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Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play | Aeon Essays

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When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gatherer education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children's opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the 'golden age' of children's free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace 'pickup' games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents' fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It's not just that we're seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.

The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability and tendency to see from another person's point of view and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play socially. Children can't learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.

In my book, Free to Learn (2013), I document these changes, and argue that the rise in mental disorders among children is largely the result of the decline in children's freedom. If we love our children and want them to thrive, we must allow them more time and opportunity to play, not less. Yet policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in the opposite direction - toward more schooling, more testing, more adult direction of children, and less opportunity for free play.

I recently took part in a radio debate with a woman representing an organisation called the National Center on Time and Learning, which campaigns for a longer school day and school year for schoolchildren in the US. Her thesis - consistent with her organisation's purpose and the urgings of President Barack Obama and the Education Secretary Arne Duncan - was that children need more time in school than currently required, to prepare them for today's and tomorrow's competitive world. I argued the opposite. The host introduced the debate with the words: 'Do students need more time to learn, or do students need more time to play?'

Learning versus playing. That dichotomy seems natural to people such as my radio host, my debate opponent, my President, my Education Secretary - and maybe you. Learning, according to that almost automatic view, is what children do in school and, maybe, in other adult-directed activities. Playing is, at best, a refreshing break from learning. From that view, summer vacation is just a long recess, perhaps longer than necessary. But here's an alternative view, which should be obvious but apparently is not: playing is learning. At play, children learn the most important of life's lessons, the ones that cannot be taught in school. To learn these lessons well, children need lots of play - lots and lots of it, without interference from adults.

I'm an evolutionary psychologist, which means I'm interested in human nature, its relationship to the nature of other animals, and how that nature was shaped by natural selection. My special interest is play.

The young of all mammals play. Why? Why do they waste energy and risk life and limb playing, when they could just rest, tucked away safely in a burrow somewhere? That's the kind of question that evolutionary psychologists ask. The first person to address that particular question from a Darwinian, evolutionary perspective was the German philosopher and naturalist Karl Groos. In a book called The Play of Animals (1898), Groos argued that play came about by natural selection as a means to ensure that animals would practise the skills they need in order to survive and reproduce.

This so-called 'practice theory of play' is well-accepted today by researchers. It explains why young animals play more than older ones (they have more to learn) and why those animals that depend least on rigid instincts for survival, and most on learning, play the most. To a considerable degree, you can predict how an animal will play by knowing what skills it must develop in order to survive and reproduce. Lion cubs and other young predators play at stalking and pouncing or chasing, while zebra colts and other prey species play at fleeing and dodging.

Do we need more people who are good at memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Who dutifully do what they are told, no questions asked?

Groos followed The Play of Animals with a second book, The Play of Man (1901), in which he extended his insights about animal play to humans. He pointed out that humans, having much more to learn than other species, are the most playful of all animals. Human children, unlike the young of other species, must learn different skills depending on the culture in which they are developing. Therefore, he argued, natural selection in humans favoured a strong drive for children to observe the activities of their elders and incorporate those activities into their play. He suggested that children in every culture, when allowed to play freely, play not only at the skills that are valuable to people everywhere (such as two-legged walking and running), but also at the skills that are specific to their culture (such as shooting bows and arrows or herding cattle).

My own research and ideas build on Groos's pioneering work. One branch of that research has been to examine children's lives in hunter-gatherer cultures. Prior to the development of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago or so, we were all hunter-gatherers. Some groups of people managed to survive as hunter-gatherers into recent times and have been studied by anthropologists. I have read all the writings I could find on hunter-gatherer childhoods, and a number of years ago I conducted a small survey of 10 anthropologists who, among them, had lived in seven different hunter-gatherer cultures on three different continents.

Hunter-gatherers have nothing akin to school. Adults believe that children learn by observing, exploring, and playing, and so they afford them unlimited time to do that. In response to my survey question, 'How much time did children in the culture you observed have for play?', the anthropologists unanimously said that the children were free to play nearly all of their waking hours, from the age of about four (when they were deemed responsible enough to go off, away from adults, with an age-mixed group of children) into their mid- or even late-teenage years (when they would begin, on their own initiatives, to take on some adult responsibilities). For example, Karen Endicott, who studied the Batek hunter-gatherers of Malaysia, reported: 'Children were free to play nearly all the time; no one expected children to do serious work until they were in their late teens.'

This is very much in line with Groos's theory about play as practice. The boys played endlessly at tracking and hunting, and both boys and girls played at finding and digging up edible roots. They played at tree climbing, cooking, building huts, and building other artefacts crucial to their culture, such as dugout canoes. They played at arguing and debating, sometimes mimicking their elders or trying to see if they could reason things out better than the adults had the night before around the fire. They playfully danced the traditional dances of their culture and sang the traditional songs, but they also made up new ones. They made and played musical instruments similar to those that adults in their group made. Even little children played with dangerous things, such as knives and fire, and the adults let them do it, because 'How else will they learn to use these things?' They did all this, and more, not because any adult required or even encouraged them to, but because they wanted to. They did it because it was fun and because something deep inside them, the result of aeons of natural selection, urged them to play at culturally appropriate activities so they would become skilled and knowledgeable adults.

In another branch of my research I've studied how children learn at a radically alternative school, the Sudbury Valley School, not far from my home in Massachusetts. It's called a school, but is as different from what we normally think of as 'school' as you can imagine. The students - who range in age from four to about 19 - are free all day to do whatever they want, as long as they don't break any of the school rules. The rules have nothing to do with learning; they have to do with keeping peace and order.

To most people, this sounds crazy. How can they learn anything? Yet, the school has been in existence for 45 years now and has many hundreds of graduates, who are doing just fine in the real world, not because their school taught them anything, but because it allowed them to learn whatever they wanted. And, in line with Groos's theory, what children in our culture want to learn when they are free turns out to be skills that are valued in our culture and that lead to good jobs and satisfying lives. When they play, these students learn to read, calculate, and use computers with the same playful passion with which hunter-gatherer kids learn to hunt and gather. They don't necessarily think of themselves as learning. They think of themselves as just playing, or 'doing things', but in the process they are learning.

Even more important than specific skills are the attitudes that they learn. They learn to take responsibility for themselves and their community, and they learn that life is fun, even (maybe especially) when it involves doing things that are difficult. I should add that this is not an expensive school; it operates on less than half as much, per student, as the local state schools and far less than most private schools.

The Sudbury Valley School and a hunter-gatherer band are very different from one another in many ways, but they are similar in providing what I see as the essential conditions for optimising children's natural abilities to educate themselves. They share the social expectation (and reality) that education is children's responsibility, not something that adults do to them, and they provide unlimited freedom for children to play, explore, and pursue their own interests. They also provide ample opportunities to play with the tools of the culture; access to a variety of caring and knowledgeable adults, who are helpers, not judges; and free age-mixing among children and adolescents (age-mixed play is more conducive to learning than play among those who are all at the same level). Finally, in both settings, children are immersed in a stable, moral community, so they acquire the values of the community and a sense of responsibility for others, not just for themselves.

I don't expect to convince most people, any time soon, that we should abolish schools as we know them today and replace them with centres for self-directed play and exploration. But I do think there is a chance of convincing most people that play outside of school is important. We have already taken too much of that away; we must not take away any more.

President Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, along with other campaigners for more conventional schooling and more tests, want children to be better prepared for today's and tomorrow's world. But what preparation is needed? Do we need more people who are good at memorising answers to questions and feeding them back? Who dutifully do what they are told, no questions asked? Schools were designed to teach people to do those things, and they are pretty good at it. Or do we need more people who ask new questions and find new answers, think critically and creatively, innovate and take initiative, and know how to learn on the job, under their own steam? I bet Obama and Duncan would agree that all children need these skills today more than in the past. But schools are terrible at teaching these skills.

For more than two decades now, education leaders in the US, the UK and Australia have been urging us to emulate Asian schools - especially those of Japan, China, and South Korea. Children there spend more time at their studies than US children, and they score higher on standardised international tests. What US Education Secretary Duncan apparently doesn't realise, or acknowledge, is that educational leaders in those countries are now increasingly judging their educational system to be a failure. While their schools have been great at getting students to score well on tests, they have been terrible at producing graduates who are creative or have a real zest for learning.

In an article entitled 'The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail' in The Wall Street Journal in December 2010, Jiang Xueqin, a prominent Chinese educator, wrote: 'The failings of a rote-memorisation system are well known: lack of social and practical skills, absence of self-discipline and imagination, loss of curiosity and passion for learning.... One way we'll know we're succeeding in changing China's schools is when those scores [on standardised tests] come down.' Meanwhile, Yong Zhao, an American education professor who grew up in China and specialises in comparing the Chinese educational system with the system in the US, notes that a common term used in China to refer to graduates is gaofen dineng, meaning 'high scores but low ability'. Because students spend nearly all their time studying, they have little opportunity to be creative, take initiative, or develop physical and social skills: in short, they have little opportunity to play.

Unfortunately, as we move increasingly toward standardised curricula, and as we occupy ever more of our children's time with schoolwork, our educational results indeed are becoming more like those of the Asian countries. One line of evidence comes from the results of a battery of measures of creativity - called the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) - collected from normative samples of US schoolchildren in kindergarten through to 12th grade (age 17-18) over several decades. Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, has analysed those scores and reported that they began to decline in 1984 or shortly after, and have continued to decline ever since. As Kim puts it in her article 'The Creativity Crisis', published in 2011 in the Creativity Research Journal, the data indicate that 'children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesising, and less likely to see things from a different angle'.

You can't teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom, and it blossoms in play

According to Kim's research, all aspects of creativity have declined, but the biggest decline is in the measure called 'creative elaboration', which assesses the ability to take a particular idea and expand on it in an interesting and novel way. Between 1984 and 2008, the average elaboration score on the TTCT, for every grade from kindergarten onwards, fell by more than one standard deviation. Stated differently, this means that more than 85 per cent of children in 2008 scored lower on this measure than did the average child in 1984. If education 'reformers' get their way, it will decline further still as children are deprived even more of play. Other research, by the psychologist Mark Runco and colleagues at the Torrance Creativity Center at the University of Georgia, shows that scores on the TTCT are the best childhood predictors we have of future real-world achievements. They are better predictors than IQ, high-school grades, or peer judgments of who will achieve the most.

You can't teach creativity; all you can do is let it blossom. Little children, before they start school, are naturally creative. Our greatest innovators, the ones we call geniuses, are those who somehow retain that childhood capacity, and build on it, right through adulthood. Albert Einstein, who apparently hated school, referred to his achievements in theoretical physics and mathematics as 'combinatorial play'. A great deal of research has shown that people are most creative when infused by the spirit of play, when they see themselves as engaged in a task just for fun. As the psychologist Teresa Amabile, professor at Harvard Business School, has shown in her book Creativity in Context (1996) and in many experiments, the attempt to increase creativity by rewarding people for it or by putting them into contests to see who is most creative has the opposite effect. It's hard to be creative when you are worried about other people's judgments. In school, children's activities are constantly being judged. School is a good place for learning to do just what someone else wants you to do; it's a terrible place for practising creativity.

When Chanoff and I studied Sudbury Valley graduates for our paper 'Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young People Who Have Charge of Their Own Education?', we asked about the activities they had played as students and about the careers they were pursuing since graduation. In many cases, there was a direct relationship between the two. Graduates were continuing to play the activities they had loved as students, with the same joy, passion, and creativity, but now they were making a living at it. There were professional musicians who had played intensively with music when they were students, and computer programmers who had spent most of their time as students playing with computers. One woman, who was the captain of a cruise ship, had spent much of her time as a student playing on the water, first with toy boats and then with real ones. A man who was a sought-after machinist and inventor had spent his childhood playfully building things and taking things apart to see how they worked.

None of these people would have discovered their passions in a standard school, where extensive, free play does not occur. In a standard school, everyone has to do the same things as everyone else. Even those who do develop an interest in something taught in school learn to tame it because, when the bell rings, they have to move on to something else. The curriculum and timetable constrain them from pursuing any interest in a creative and personally meaningful way. Years ago, children had time outside of school to pursue interests, but today they are so busy with schoolwork and other adult-directed activities that they rarely have time and opportunity to discover and immerse themselves deeply in activities they truly enjoy.

To have a happy marriage, or good friends, or helpful work partners, we need to know how to get along with other people: perhaps the most essential skill all children must learn for a satisfying life. In hunter-gatherer bands, at Sudbury Valley School, and everywhere that children have regular access to other children, most play is social play. Social play is the academy for learning social skills.

The reason why play is such a powerful way to impart social skills is that it is voluntary. Players are always free to quit, and if they are unhappy they will quit. Every player knows that, and so the goal, for every player who wants to keep the game going, is to satisfy his or her own needs and desires while also satisfying those of the other players, so they don't quit. Social play involves lots of negotiation and compromise. If bossy Betty tries to make all the rules and tell her playmates what to do without paying attention to their wishes, her playmates will quit and leave her alone, starting their own game elsewhere. That's a powerful incentive for her to pay more attention to them next time. The playmates who quit might have learnt a lesson, too. If they want to play with Betty, who has some qualities they like, they will have to speak up more clearly next time, to make their desires plain, so she won't try to run the show and ruin their fun. To have fun in social play you have to be assertive but not domineering; that's true for all of social life.

Watch any group of children in play and you will see lots of negotiation and compromise. Preschoolers playing a game of 'house' spend more time figuring out how to play than actually playing. Everything has to be negotiated - who gets to be the mommy and who has to be the baby, who gets to use which props, and how the drama will unfold. The skilled players use tag questions to turn their assertions into requests: 'Let's pretend that the necklace is mine. OK?' If it's not OK, a discussion ensues.

We're not all equally strong, equally quick-witted, equally healthy; but we are all equally worthy of respect and of having our needs met

Or watch an age-mixed group of children playing a 'pickup' game of baseball. A pickup game is play, because it's directed by the players themselves, not by outside authorities (coaches and umpires) as a Little League game would be. The players have to choose sides, negotiate rules to fit the conditions, decide what's fair and foul. They have to co-operate not just with the players on their team, but also with those on the other team, and they have to be sensitive to the needs and abilities of all the players. Big Billy might be the best pitcher, but if others want a turn at pitching he'd better let them have it, so they don't quit. And when he pitches to tiny Timmy, who is just learning the game, he'd better toss the ball gently, right toward Timmy's bat, or even his own teammates will call him mean. When he pitches to walloping Wally, however, he'd better throw his best stuff, because Wally would feel insulted by anything less. In the pickup game, keeping the game going and fun for everyone is far more important than winning.

The golden rule of social play is not 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Rather, it's something much more difficult: 'Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.' To do that, you have to get into other people's minds and see from their points of view. Children practise that all the time in social play. The equality of play is not the equality of sameness. Rather, it is the equality that comes from respecting individual differences and treating each person's needs and wishes as equally important. That's also, I think, the best interpretation of Thomas Jefferson's line that all men are created equal. We're not all equally strong, equally quick-witted, equally healthy; but we are all equally worthy of respect and of having our needs met.

I don't want to over-idealise children. Not all children learn these lessons easily; bullies exist. But social play is by far the most effective venue for learning such lessons, and I suspect that children's strong drive for such play came about, in evolution, primarily for that purpose. Anthropologists report an almost complete lack of bullying or domineering behaviour in hunter-gatherer bands. In fact, another label regularly used for such band societies is egalitarian societies. The bands have no chiefs, no hierarchical structure of authority; they share everything and co-operate intensively in order to survive; and they make decisions that affect the whole band through long discussions aimed at consensus. A major reason why they are able to do all that, I think, lies in the extraordinary amount of social play that they enjoy in childhood. The skills and values practised in such play are precisely those that are essential to life in a hunter-gatherer band. Today you might survive without those skills and values, but, I think, not happily.

So, play teaches social skills without which life would be miserable. But it also teaches how to manage intense, negative emotions such as fear and anger. Researchers who study animal play argue that one of play's major purposes is to help the young learn how to cope emotionally (as well as physically) with emergencies. Juvenile mammals of many species deliberately and repeatedly put themselves into moderately dangerous, moderately frightening situations in their play. Depending on the species, they might leap awkwardly into the air making it difficult to land, run along the edges of cliffs, swing from tree branch to tree branch high enough that a fall would hurt, or play-fight in such a way that they take turns getting into vulnerable positions from which they must then escape.

Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates

Human children, when free, do the same thing, which makes their mothers nervous. They are dosing themselves with fear, aimed at reaching the highest level they can tolerate, and learning to cope with it. Such play must always be self-directed, never forced or even encouraged by an authority figure. It's cruel to force children to experience fears they aren't ready for, as gym teachers do when they require all children in a class to climb ropes to the rafters or swing from one stand to another. In those cases the results can be panic, embarrassment, and shame, which reduce rather than increase future tolerance for fear.

Children also experience anger in their play. Anger can arise from an accidental or deliberate push, or a tease, or from failure to get one's way in a dispute. But children who want to continue playing know they have to control that anger, use it constructively in self-assertion, and not lash out. Tantrums might work with parents, but they never work with playmates. There is evidence that the young of other species also learn to regulate their anger and aggressiveness through social play.

In school, and in other settings where adults are in charge, they make decisions for children and solve children's problems. In play, children make their own decisions and solve their own problems. In adult-directed settings, children are weak and vulnerable. In play, they are strong and powerful. The play world is the child's practice world for being an adult. We think of play as childish, but to the child, play is the experience of being like an adult: being self-controlled and responsible. To the degree that we take away play, we deprive children of the ability to practise adulthood, and we create people who will go through life with a sense of dependence and victimisation, a sense that there is some authority out there who is supposed to tell them what to do and solve their problems. That is not a healthy way to live.

Researchers have developed ways to raise young rats and monkeys in such a way that they experience other forms of social interaction but not play. The result is that the play-deprived animals are emotionally crippled when tested as young adults. When placed in a moderately frightening novel environment, they freeze in terror and fail to overcome that fear and explore the novel area, as a normal rat or monkey would do. When placed with an unfamiliar peer they might cower in fear or lash out with inappropriate and ineffective aggression, or both.

In recent decades we as a society have been conducting a play-deprivation experiment with our children. Today's children are not absolutely deprived of play as the rats and monkeys are in the animal experiments, but they are much more deprived than children were 60 years ago and much, much more than children were in hunter-gatherer societies. The results, I think, are in. Play deprivation is bad for children. Among other things, it promotes anxiety, depression, suicide, narcissism, and loss of creativity. It's time to end the experiment.

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Children today are suffering a severe deficit of play | Aeon Essays

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Children today are cossetted and pressured in equal measure. Without the freedom to play they will never grow up

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The importance of play: what universities can learn from preschools - Schools Improvement Net

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The importance of play: what universities can learn from preschools - Schools Improvement Net

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Professor Nicola Whitton of Manchester Metropolitan University, writing in the Conversation, says 'young people need to be creative, resourceful and resilient to succeed' in this world, and learning through play has an important role in developing these skills even at university level.

Almost as soon as they begin school, children start getting tested. With the introduction of tests for four-year-olds and the explicit link between test results and school performance, education policies of successive governments have led to an increased emphasis on results at all levels of schooling.

This focus has lead to a stigmatisation of failure, even though it is fundamental to the learning process from preschool all the way to university.

This ill-prepares learners for real life, which does not provide set answers to problems with neat scores to gauge progress. The real world is messy and diverse, and young people need to be creative, resourceful and resilient to succeed in it. One of the best ways to achieve this is through play.

The best kind of learning is "intrinsically motivated", where students want to learn because it is interesting, purposeful and personally relevant, not because it is assessed. Learning takes place through action, failure, reflection, and practice. But while making mistakes is an inevitable part of this process, our school system fails to recognise this.

Exam grades are often seen as more important than fostering a love of learning - and as a result schools are overlooking the value of learning that does not fit into a specified curriculum.

When students reach university, most have learned that grades (and their impact on job opportunities) are of prime importance. For many, the magic of learning out of interest and passion has been eclipsed. The introduction of tuition fees has only increased the expectation that the role of university is to provide qualifications rather than focus on the intrinsic value of education.

This shift in expectation is hardly surprising given that students have to consider their personal investments and the returns they are likely to receive. This makes perfect sense for an individual student, but does not take into account what is best for society, which needs people to be creative and take risks, not simply focus on scoring highly in a test.

The need to fail

While many students fail university modules and drop out of courses, this is often seen as a last resort and universities are becoming increasingly averse to failing their students. A focus on one-shot assessments does not give students opportunities to fail regularly on a less catastrophic level.

The ability to manage failure, both emotionally and practically, increases the ability to manage risk. It is only by taking risks that we can explore new possibilities and ways of thinking. We are in danger of creating a generation of risk-averse students. The possibility of failure can also actually increase a person's intrinsic motivation: if success is certain, there is little challenge and so little motivation.

One way to develop a generation who can take risks is through playful learning. Play supports socialisation and decreases stress, develops imagination and creativity, enables learners to have new experiences, and learn from their mistakes.

While it is integral to early years education, a focus on assessment has all but driven play out of schools. The relative flexibility of higher education curricula and teaching approaches provide opportunities to give learners chances to play, experiment, experience, and fail - and, most importantly, learn from those failures.

Playtime at university

Several UK universities are already embracing elements of playful learning. For example, the University of Portsmouth uses "pervasive learning" activities, where courses are taught through playful, detailed simulations in which students work together to solve problems and make mistakes away from the real consequences of assessment.

The Great History Conundrum at the University of Leicester, which runs every year for first-year students, uses an online puzzle-solving card game to teach critical historical literacy. Students play as long as they like to collect enough points to pass the course: if they fail on one puzzle they can move on to the next.

Students at Manchester Metropolitan University play the Staying the Course game during induction to highlight the range of university support available. The University of Brighton has also used alternate reality games during induction, which allow students to work together to solve online and physical puzzles, and large-scale multi-player quizzes to engage new students and orientate them to university life in novel ways.

These kind of approaches do not work in every context, and will inevitably meet resistance from some students and academics. We have to make the case that far from trivialising education, playful learning makes it richer, more purposeful, and more useful for life after education.

Playful learning is not an easy option. It is more academically challenging, making students less reliant on rote learning and established ideas. To embrace playful learning, we need to create more opportunities for students to fail safely and focus on the development of intrinsic motivation, passion and curiosity. Crucially, we must radically rethink how, and why, we assess our students.
Read more articles at the Conversation Interesting idea - what do you think of the idea of using more playful learning at university and, perhaps to a greater degree in secondary level? Also, as Professor Whitton points out, is it surely possible that as many might be turned off by such an approach as turned on, so how do you use it in a constructive way? Please give us your feedback in the comments or via Twitter... Don't forget you can sign up to receive our daily email bulletin (around 7am) with all the latest schools news stories. Your details will never be given to anyone else and you can unsubscribe at any stage. Just follow this We now have a Facebook page - pls click to like! link
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The importance of play: what universities can learn from preschools - Schools Improvement Net

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Professor Nicola Whitton of Manchester Metropolitan University, writing in the Conversation, says 'young people need to be creative, resourceful and resilient to succeed' in this world, and learning through play has an important role in developing these skills even at university level. Almost as soon as they begin school, children start getting tested.

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More play time needed on journey in learning, Singapore News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

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More play time needed on journey in learning, Singapore News & Top Stories - The Straits Times

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Children today are not getting as much play time as their parents did - and this is affecting their foundational development.

Child development expert Gill Connell, 58, who was in Singapore last week, said movement was essential for children to develop foundational skills for school and life.

The New Zealand consultant and author of four books has worked with government body Sports New Zealand, schools in different countries and toy firm Hasbro, and believes in learning through play.

But children in general, including in Ms Connell's area of focus - those aged seven and younger - are less active compared with those in previous generations because parents fall into the trap of being overprotective or too prescriptive.

They may do things for their children, such as carrying them even when they can walk or disallowing play in the park or playground for fear of injury, making them miss out on experiences that would stimulate them in growing physically as well as mentally, in developing traits such as independence, courage and resilience.

Ms Connell said: "I am concerned that childhood is disappearing."

Observing a child's behaviour can offer clues to aspects of his physical development, said Ms Gill Connell. For instance:

* Children who fidget may not have good balance - keeping still requires an advanced sense of balance. They may need to do more activities to help their balance, such as rolling or hanging upside down.

* Children who push their friends while hugging them may not be able to adjust their strength. To better control their muscles, they can do activities such as pouring water from one cup to another .

* Children who appear clumsy and often trip over things, for instance, may not be able to relate well to the space around them. They may need to take part in more activities such as crawling through tunnels to see how their bodies relate to spaces and objects. Examples of activities parents can do at home with their children can be found on Ms Connell's blog at movingsmartblog. blogspot.com

The avid lover of the outdoors, who enjoys activities such as hiking, mountain biking and fishing, said of her childhood: "I was brought up like that. I used to go fishing with my dad. From age three, he used to take me on overnight fishing experiences. He would say, hold my fishing line, and I would wind in a fish for him."

Ms Connell said of children: "They are right-brain thinkers, they learn through play, new experience, creativity. It's not about the answer, it's about the journey."

Movement from natural play helps children develop their muscles. For instance, actions such as hanging from monkey bars help children develop the muscles for holding a pencil or controlling it to properly form letters, Ms Connell said.

"Kids are wired to do these things: pulling themselves along, gripping, pushing and pulling... that's the beginning of the pencil grip but (people) don't make that connection."

She believes that children's behaviour, combined with an understanding of the child and his circumstances, sends messages about the areas of development they may need.

For instance, a well-rested child who frequently blinks or rubs his eyes may need to develop his visual acuity. To do that, parents or educators can help by getting the child to play games, such as catching a feather in a cup.

At age 18, Ms Connell started teaching, going on to teach children aged five and below, including in music and movement. In 1999, when she was 40, she started her consultancy Moving Smart. She hopes to change mindsets with her Smart Steps programme - a pre-school programme integrating numeracy, literacy and language learning with physical play.

The programme will be used at the Australian International School's and Stamford American International School's joint Early Learning Village for children aged 18 months to six years, which will open from July.

While there are other experts of the play-based approach, Ms Connell believes her strength lies in being a "storyteller" - articulating the link between play and how it develops the brain and the body, and sharing anecdotes to make it real for people.

Having raised three daughters, now aged 29, 33 and 35, Ms Connell said she understood the anxiety of parents wanting their children to meet their pre-set ideas of developmental milestones but advised against interfering with nature.

These include trying to get their child to walk when he has not yet learnt to crawl or has not spent enough time crawling to develop his muscles and reflexes, or putting the child in a walker, which is not a natural position.

Her advice for parents is to provide children with sensory experiences and play with them without taking over how they choose to play. Parents should also ask questions that would evoke their child's curiosity, instead of asking questions with right-or-wrong answers.

For instance, ask "What do you think will happen if we did this?", instead of "What's this?"

Said Ms Connell: "Don't try to teach them (children) all the time. Let them invite you into play."

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More play time needed on journey in learning

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Children today are not getting as much play time as their parents did - and this is affecting their foundational development. Child development expert Gill Connell, 58, who was in Singapore last week, said movement was essential for children to develop foundational skills for school and life.

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LET’S NOT LET KINDERGARTEN DISAPPEAR! | Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

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LET’S NOT LET KINDERGARTEN DISAPPEAR! | Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

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What have we done to kindergarten? Like the loss of so many aspects of our democracy, the concept of kindergarten as a garden for children is disappearing from sight. In both cases, my heart is breaking.

I've made the unfortunate move of joining some Facebook sites for kindergarten teachers and when I read many of the posts, my blood begins to boil.
* "We introduce 2 new words a week as well as review what we have learned. (We have 40 words on our county sight word list.) The motions and visual piece really help my kiddos. I do not always read what is listed on the back...Sometimes I just make up my own."
* " I only have 25 mandatory words, but last year when all the kiddos mastered them by November, I carefully selected another 25 to put out there for exposure. I use the small cards, in a pocket chart near our morning meeting things. Introduce 5 or so a week October - December and then daily review one column of five each day of the week."
* "We have 87 sight words!!!"
* "Our home living areas were taken away this summer"

What does NAEYC, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, say about appropriate kindergarten practices? How do they define what seems to be considered an out of date expression "Developmentally Appropriate Practices?" I went to their website to check it out.

Here's what is written on their Kindergarten page:
"Developmentally appropriate practice... is an approach to teaching grounded in the research on how young children develop and learn and in what is known about effective early education. Its framework is designed to promote young children's optimal learning and development.
DAP involves teachers meeting young children where they are (by stage of development), both as individuals and as part of a group; and helping each child meet challenging and achievable learning goals."

They write that kindergarten must fit appropriately between preschool and first grade. I'll add to that by saying that kindergarten shouldn't be confused with first grade.

Here are some teaching tips that are provided on the NAEYC kindergarten page:

"Teachers must balance kindergartners' varying abilities and needs while making sure that the curriculum fits appropriately between preschool and first grade.

Let's see what DAP {Developmentally Appropriate Practice} in kindergarten looks like:
Mrs. K sits with Keira, going over letter-sound correspondence. Then she goes to the block area to help Shelley. Mrs. K doesn't make pronouncements; instead, she respectfully waits for the right moment to build on children's existing conversations. She listens attentively and understands where, when, and how to intervene. She joins in the children's play, modeling positive behavior. Her contributions are subtle, playful, and full of teaching.

Kindergarten teachers must fully engage in the social world of the classroom and be intentional in their interactions and instruction. With the many differences among-and wide age range of-kindergartners, teachers should be responsive to developmental, individual, and cultural variation. Thoughtful, sensitive teaching promotes a joy of learning and prepares children for further academic challenges.

* Acknowledge what children do or say. Let children know that we have noticed by giving positive attention, sometimes through comments, sometimes through just sitting nearby and observing. ("Thanks for your help, Kavi." "You found another way to show 5.")

* Encourage persistence and effort rather than just praising and evaluating what the child has done. ("You're thinking of lots of words to describe the dog in the story. Let's keep going!")

* Give specific feedback rather than general comments. ("The beanbag didn't get all the way to the hoop, James, so you might try throwing it harder.")

* Model attitudes, ways of approaching problems, and behavior toward others, showing children rather than just telling them ("Hmm, that didn't work and I need to think about why." "I'm sorry, Ben, I missed part of what you said. Please tell me again.")

* Demonstrate the correct way to do something. This usually involves a procedure that needs to be done in a certain way (such as using a wire whisk or writing the letter P).

* Create or add challenge so that a task goes a bit beyond what the children can already do. For example, you lay out a collection of chips, count them together and then ask a small group of children to tell you how many are left after they see you removing some of the chips. The children count the remaining chips to help come up with the answer. To add a challenge, you could hide the chips after you remove some, and the children will have to use a strategy other than counting the remaining chips to come up with the answer. To reduce challenge, you could simplify the task by guiding the children to touch each chip once as they count the remaining chips.

* Ask questions that provoke children's thinking. ("If you couldn't talk to your partner, how else could you let him know what to do?")

* Give assistance (such as a cue or hint) to help children work on the edge of their current competence ("Can you think of a word that rhymes with your name, Matt? How about bat . . . Matt/bat? What else rhymes with Matt and bat?")

* Provide information, directly giving children facts, verbal labels, and other information. ("This one that looks like a big mouse with a short tail is called a vole.")

* Give directions for children's action or behavior. ("Touch each block only once as you count them." "You want to move that icon over here? Okay, click on it and hold down, then drag it to wherever you want.")"

It's interesting that there's nothing written about requiring children to memorize a bank of sight words or number facts. The emphasis seems to be more on helping children to understand, question, manipulate materials. Although the expression isn't used, the message is to consider the child's Zone of Actual Development and Zone of Proximal Development when introducing a challenge.

It's so important that teachers and administrators remember the importance of play in the life of a four, five and six year old child. As I wrote in my book Choice Time: How to Deepen Learning Through Inquiry and Play, "...when children are at play, they're not just playing - they're learning. Play is the engine that drives their learning."

Photo: Kristin Eno

All of this information presents some big challenges. How can we be sure that teachers of kindergarten children understand the basic principles of developmentally appropriate practice? How can we support them to stand up to administrators who don't have this understanding so that they can provide joyful, playful, intellectually challenging kindergarten classrooms?

These are important questions that I'm pondering. What are your thoughts and suggestions? How can we support kindergarten classrooms where the goal for each child isn't to memorize 80 sight words but rather to develop socially, creatively and inquisitively?

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Investigating Choice Time: Inquiry, Exploration, and Play

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What have we done to kindergarten? Like the loss of so many aspects of our democracy, the concept of kindergarten as a garden for children is disappearing from sight. In both cases, my heart is breaking. I've made the unfortunate move of joining some Facebook sites for kindergarten teachers and when I read many of the posts, my blood begins to boil.

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School starting age: the evidence | University of Cambridge

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School starting age: the evidence | University of Cambridge

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In England children now start formal schooling, and the formal teaching of literacy and numeracy at the age of four. A recent letter signed by around 130 early childhood education experts, including myself, published in the Daily Telegraph (11 Sept 2013) advocated an extension of informal, play-based pre-school provision and a delay to the start of formal 'schooling' in England from the current effective start until the age of seven (in line with a number of other European countries who currently have higher levels of academic achievement and child well-being).

This is a brief review of the relevant research evidence which overwhelmingly supports a later start to formal education. This evidence relates to the contribution of playful experiences to children's development as learners, and the consequences of starting formal learning at the age of four to five years of age

There are several strands of evidence which all point towards the importance of play in young children's development, and the value of an extended period of playful learning before the start of formal schooling. These arise from anthropological, psychological, neuroscientific and educational studies. Anthropological studies of children's play in extant hunter-gatherer societies, and evolutionary psychology studies of play in the young of other mammalian species, have identified play as an adaptation which evolved in early human social groups. It enabled humans to become powerful learners and problem-solvers. Neuroscientific studies have shown that playful activity leads to synaptic growth, particularly in the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for all the uniquely human higher mental functions.

In my own area of experimental and developmental psychology, studies have also consistently demonstrated the superior learning and motivation arising from playful, as opposed to instructional, approaches to learning in children. Pretence play supports children's early development of symbolic representational skills, including those of literacy, more powerfully than direct instruction. Physical, constructional and social play supports children in developing their skills of intellectual and emotional 'self-regulation', skills which have been shown to be crucial in early learning and development. Perhaps most worrying, a number of studies have documented the loss of play opportunities for children over the second half of the 20th century and demonstrated a clear link with increased indicators of stress and mental health problems.

Within educational research, a number of longitudinal studies have demonstrated superior academic, motivational and well-being outcomes for children who had attended child-initiated, play-based pre-school programmes. One particular study of 3,000 children across England, funded by the Department for Education themselves, showed that an extended period of high quality, play-based pre-school education was of particular advantage to children from disadvantaged households.

Studies have compared groups of children in New Zealand who started formal literacy lessons at ages 5 and 7. Their results show that the early introduction of formal learning approaches to literacy does not improve children's reading development, and may be damaging. By the age of 11 there was no difference in reading ability level between the two groups, but the children who started at 5 developed less positive attitudes to reading, and showed poorer text comprehension than those children who had started later. In a separate study of reading achievement in 15 year olds across 55 countries, researchers showed that there was no significant association between reading achievement and school entry age.

This body of evidence raises important and serious questions concerning the direction of travel of early childhood education policy currently in England. In the interests of children's academic achievements and their emotional well-being, the UK government should take this evidence seriously.

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david whitebread david whitebread childhood

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children school of the humanities and social sciences

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-faculty of education faculty of education

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school of the humanities and social sciences

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In England children now start formal schooling, and the formal teaching of literacy and numeracy at the age of four.