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.