Playful Learning from Princesses to Airplanes

Today’s children are living in our commercial-driven consumer world just as we are, and it has indeed taken affect on them. Very young children are exposed to figures and characters of popular culture on a daily basis—after all, these products are deliberately marketed to them. While many teachers feel that such popular culture and media belongs outside the classroom, it has become evident to me over the past six months of observing elementary classrooms that a child’s interest is often the very best place to start.

Dr. Karen Wohlwend has conducted research in kindergarten classrooms, finding out how the way that children play is connected with their growing literacy practices. I have learned how informed teachers in early elementary classrooms can use their students’ interests as grounds for writing, drawing, making, playing, and communicating with their peers. Her research shows that by addressing these popular media themes in the classroom, children are actually given an opportunity to address, enact, and recreate how these well-known figures are portrayed. This allows children to express themselves through their own appropriated stories and creations—an abstract way to speak your voice.

Wohlwend reminds us that even when students are conversing with one another while playing, there is always something to be observed—something to learn. This ranges from girls repositioning princesses as sword-fighters, to editing and revising storyboards, to forming social barriers, to young boys exaggerating when playing the role of a girl—highlighting the contrast between who they are playing and who they are in real life. 

In the case of a boy who was fascinated by making paper airplanes, his teacher suggested he make a how-to book of directions for making paper airplanes for Writers’ Workshop. This writing activity combined the boy’s personal interest, something he could confidently do and explain how to do, with a bit of a challenge—transcribing his verbal instructions into directions for folding steps.

Students’ interests are wonderful tools for literacy development, even when they are popular media characters and stories. Great teachers find ways to merge the values of peer and classroom cultures so that all students can experience being directors, teachers, and learners.

On learning through playing...

I remember kindergarten, back in 1992. It was incredible. I remember meeting my best friend Cassie, at a short table covered in books near the front of the room; we were both really shy. I remember stations, reading books, making things all the time, and being very aware that Mrs. Kranz loved patterns. I remember Mrs. Kranz’s perfect handwriting, and deciding that ‘e’ was the most cheerful-looking letter in the alphabet. I remember one time marching around the room in a single-file line to the record player, and trying to improvise movements that went with the music. I remember feeling really awkward about it.

We had a class stuffed animal dog named Sunshine, which happened to be the exact same stuffed animal as my beloved Bitsy at home. Every day we sang, “You are my sunshine—my only sunshine. You make me happy—when skies are grey. You’ll never know dear—how much I love you. So please don’t take—my sunshine away.” Throughout the year, every kid in the class got to take Sunshine home for a weekend. He came with a journal. It was a collection of all the adventures he had with the students of our class. Each child (with the help of a parent) would write about what they had done over the weekend together. Every Monday we all got the latest update of the journal through this shared reading experience. We were creating our own current events, and keeping up with them through literacy—which allows all children to learn and participate.

If you had asked me when I was six, if I thought of these daily experiences as “learning,” I would probably have laughed. We were just having fun! Looking back, I see the many opportunities for growth in each of these activities. In her book Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Belonging in the Early Childhood Classroom, Dr. Wohlwend describes a kindergarten class where children “continually select from a range of choices to map out a unique learning path for themselves each day.” Kindergarten is a crucial, transitional year for young children—a year that can be described as an apprenticeship to becoming a student.

Children learn and discover through play practices when they make decisions, use what they know, work with others, communicate, and approximate different tasks, like reading, writing, and even teaching. As teachers and parents, it is important that we recognize the significance of play-based learning and encourage children’s enthusiasm to do so. Through playing, students can independently transform an idea into action, a story into a performance, and fifteen minutes into a wonderland of learning opportunities.

Inferring: "the heartbeat of comprehension"

When it comes to understanding a story, inferring and summarizing help a reader a great deal. What’s wonderful about these two strategies is that students already use them! When a child is asked, “How was your friend’s birthday party?” They might answer with an adjective, and then giving a brief summary of what they did. They may answer, “It was fun! We played games and ate cake and ice cream, and Riley loved the present I gave her.”

Pointing out to students how they are already using reading comprehension strategies in other daily situations is a great place to start. Pat Johnson and Katie Keier (2010) stress that it is not important for students to be able to name what they are doing—they do not need to have a term for inferring or for summarizing. Understanding these concepts and being able to use them is the real goal. 

One way that teachers and parents can help their readers is through modeling these strategies when reading aloud. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a great mini-lesson that a teacher used in the multiage classroom that I observed last semester. As she read Poppleton, the students made inferences about Poppleton’s feelings, and how they changed throughout the story. By watching the demonstration and think aloud, the students knew exactly what they were supposed to do when they went to read independently. They successfully marked how they thought the characters were feelings in their books with sticky notes.

There are countless books that lend themselves nicely to making inferences. For example, in stories where the main character is never actually described by the narrator, but rather readers can figure out what he or she is like based on their actions. Stories that have a conflict or a mystery are also great for making inferences because the plot works towards resolving the problem, and meanwhile the reader can use clues and other information from the story to infer how it will be resolved. Poems are another great choice for trying to figure out meaning, because the poets convey so many ideas in a limited amount of words.

Every year in third grade, students across America will be asked, “What is the main idea of this passage?” on a standardized test (Johnson & Keier, 2010). As teachers and parents, we can help our students long before that third grade test—and not even for the sake of the test. We can begin talking about reading, thinking about the story, thinking about the characters, making predictions about the characters, and summarizing main points early on so that children grow up understanding the power of a story—for their own benefit. There are plenty of opportunities to build the concept of inferring and summarizing in everyday events. It is up to us to make the best use of them.

Be real.

When it comes to assessing children on their reading skills there is much to think about. We must pay close attention to what children are able to do on their own, and what they need more guided practice with. If we are to help children learn in a day-to-day classroom, as educators, we cannot wait around for the results from a standardized test, nor can we expect those results to tell us anything significant about the individual needs of our unique readers. We are far more capable, ourselves, of learning where a student is on their literacy quest, and providing them with tools to get there.

What we can do is use authentic, ongoing, and informative assessment, as Pat Johnson and Katie Keier suggest in their book Catching Readers Before They Fall. We must utilize the power of observation to understand where our readers are, what they need, and how we can help them get there. Keeping records and notes of these observations in a very organized accessible system is key. This way we will become familiar with what strategies the student is currently trying, and be able to make decisions about further instruction. By keeping consistent records we can find patterns and see progress over time.

It’s also essential to have authentic conversations with students about the text they are working with. By asking questions and having students retell the stories we are giving them real opportunities for comprehension. These personalized ways of working with students are just that—personal. No standardized test, computerized reading program, or phonics work alone is going to help children become better readers. Children will learn to read and write by practicing reading and writing. On top of that, they must enjoy it.

Today I listened to a podcast on the Voice of Literacy with Dr. Caitlin Dooley. In discussing the high stakes testing that we are dealing with today in our nation’s schools, she mentioned our need for more authentic assessment. I think that students should be able to use the real-life reading and writing skills that they learn in school in assessments. They should not have to deal with and understand the complicated test language and test-taking strategies that teachers nowadays discuss with their students. If the point is to become a proficient reader and writer, our students need engaging opportunities to do just that, on a daily basis.

Dr. Dooley points out that while No Child Left Behind was intended to help our most struggling readers improve, it has actually created a gap in the level of instruction. She says that in terms of achievement, we are at the same place that we were in the 1980s. What can we do about it? As P. David Pearson suggests, we can give students text that is interesting, text that focuses on well-known topics for children like friendship, betrayal, and trust, and then have rich conversations about it. I remember the first time I really devoured a novel in high school. I was sixteen, it was The Great Gatsby, and we did it as a class with our teacher as a guide. For the first time I really thought about literature; it actually meant something to me. It transformed books into story worlds, which you can disappear into. I needed that experience to get to that point. As Dick Allington points out, “How are they going to get better if they don’t read?”

Reading comprehension is personal and eclectic.

How do you explain how to understand? How can you make sense of how to make sense? When it comes to teaching reading comprehension, these are things you must be able to talk about and demonstrate. There is no master plan for this because different students have different needs. Some students learn to comprehend what they read without ever having a discussion about it, while some require demonstration and guided practice. We can model how we use strategies, allow students to converse about these demonstrations, and guide them into working independently.

Last semester I observed a multiage classroom, grades 1-2-3, and in the beginning I wondered how it was possible to teach a wide range of students reading and writing skills when they are all at such different levels. It wasn’t long until I was continually amazed at how the teacher’s lessons and demonstrations could be interpreted by students age six to ten. The class would come together for directions before starting their writer’s workshop or independent reading time, and during that time she would read part of a story or go over a piece of her writing with the whole class. The focus would range from persuasive writing to following a character’s emotions in the story to understand how he or she is feeling. She would always think-out-loud, and share with the class what strategies helped her become a better reader and writer.

One great example of a shared demonstration was when this teacher was going to read aloud a book about one of the class’s favorite characters—Poppleton. The focus of the mini-lesson was to pay attention to the characters feelings and how they change throughout the story. They knew Poppleton well, so it was a great book for this. They made a list on large chart paper of the character’s traits, which stay the same, and the character’s feelings, which change as you read. The students contributed what they knew about Poppleton; he is “calm, patient, kind, and quieter.” As she read, everyone paid close attention to his feelings, and raised their hands when his emotions changed. They wrote the feelings on post-it notes and stuck them on the pages. He started out happy, then became annoyed, then felt awful, and then happy again. She explained how thinking about Poppleton’s feelings helped her understand the story better, because she knew how the character was feeling because of what was happening. Then they went off to practice this on their own, putting post-it notes with emotions in the books they were reading.

I came to realize that this worked so well was because she was modeling strategies that work for her, and explaining how students could use it when they are reading. Every student must figure out what works best for them, and eventually develop their own system of reading for meaning. For some students maybe this strategy really helped, and perhaps some students were already there. Pat Johnson’s example of reading a newspaper article to answer her questions in Catching Readers Before They Fall reminded me of this example.

The bottom line is that reading comprehension is personal and unique to every student. Despite what the authorities are telling teachers to teach when it comes to reading, I am coming to find that the best teachers know to follow the students. Check in with them, monitor their progress, have little conferences, and really get to know them and their abilities. Only then will you know what they really need to work on, and what strategies may help them get where they are going—in a way that makes sense to them.

Don't you read what you want to read?

I have been observing elementary classrooms for the past few months. There have been aspects of the daily classroom agenda that I have witnessed, even helped out with, but not understood the logic behind. One example of this is leveled reading, which I have helped out with, usually in 15 to 20 minute increments. Naturally, different groups of children have responded to their leveled-guided reading groups in different ways. I have seen eight-year-olds partner up and read about rivers and glaciers enthusiastically, and I have also seen students who cannot approach this as an authentic reading experience because the text is something they could care less about.

After reading Let’s Start Leveling about Leveling by Glasswell & Ford, I have come to realize that reading is a very powerful and complex process that should not be simplified down to numbers and levels. More than anything, students need interesting text; they need to be engaged with what they are reading. Even if a book is above a student’s level, if they are intrigued by it, as teachers and parents we should celebrate this. Glasswell & Ford (2011) say, “Books are just books in the end. And while it’s easy to be critical of certain materials, they are usually neither inherently bad nor good. What matters more is the way they are used; it is this that determines the potential impact they can have.”

We need to keep in mind how these systems are created, who our children are, and what reading is about. These systems are designed mathematically, using criteria like number of words, number of pages, skills like “word identification accuracy,” and then assigns a letter to represent their ability on a ladder which children are expected to steadily climb. Children, on the other hand, are young people. They are human beings with imaginations, personal interests, and exponential learning capacities. I can’t help but think that if I was eight years old (or six years old, or ten years old), and I finally had the power to read, that I would want to use that power to find out about what I am interested in. Readers have the right to enjoy reading. After all, it is a language created for humans to communicate. And that is personal.

In the end, the judgment of the teacher—who knows their students’ interests and abilities—is more valuable than what a system of leveled books suggests. I plan to collect a library of children’s books on a wide range of subjects, fiction and non-fiction, to engage a wide range of readers. I think that students should get to choose books that interest them, and that they should be provided large amounts of time to read independently for enjoyment during the school day.

Vocabulary, in systems

Over the weekend I listened to a podcast on Voice of Literacy, with Dr. Neuman of the University of Michigan. She traveled the country researching programs that concentrate on vocabulary in the very early elementary years. She found that teachers at middle school and high school levels assume vocabulary lessons are taught at the primary level, but they are not. Out of 55 different schools visited, there were no planned lessons in vocabulary. It appeared that explicit vocabulary instruction was missing from the curriculum.

Dr. Neuman tells teachers and parents, “Focus more explicitly on vocabulary development early on.” This is why she has launched “World of Words”—or “WOW” as it is called—encouraging young children to become word-conscious. Young children deserve to have a curriculum that can accelerate vocabulary knowledge so that they can go into the latter grades of elementary school prepared, knowing the appropriate words to talk about ideas in science, social studies, and math.

Children need to have a self-teaching mechanism to work from. Yes, children learn from their teachers and their modeling of strategies, but children also need to learn on their own. One way that this can be setup for children is to teach words in categories or groups. When there are categories of words (ex. apple, strawberry, mango, banana), the child will have the opportunity to recognize the word itself, as well as how it is connected to a particular group. Systems like these help children organize their ideas and connect new knowledge to what they already know, expanding their schema. Now when they hear, “A pear is a kind of fruit,” they can make connections to the other fruits they know, enhancing their conceptual development.

These somewhat abstract ideas and strategies can be illustrated to children with charts. In an article called Schema, Miller says that “Charting holds thinking—it makes our thinking public and permanent, and traces our works together.” Being able to see your thoughts mapped out is a great advantage, and children love seeing their thoughts too, up in front of the class. It shows them that they are an integral part of the lesson and that their thoughts are important.

Dr. Neuman says that the bottom line is “oral language comprehension is the foundation of early literacy development.” She encourages us to engage in responsive talking with kids, and work on their agenda. Listen to what they have to say, use intelligent language, and answer all of their questions—even if it’s nonstop. These children are learning from us, so it is important not to talk down to them, but to use interesting words like fatigue, as Dr. Neuman suggests. Hearing new words perks up children’s minds and gets them thinking in new ways. Providing systems for them to organize and remember these words—even better.