Dear Parents,
The phrase “children learn through play” is a one that we Early Childhood Educators toss around freely and often. I suspect that it is not always as well understood as we think. Hopefully the following will help you understand how this concept works in preschool.
· “Preschoolers are wigglers and doers”. No surprise here. We all know that. That is why it achieves better results to work with children by providing engaging activities than to work against their natures by making them sit still for long periods of time, talking at them, having a rigid structure, and having all the children do the same thing at the same time.
· “Research shows that young children learn best through manipulation of materials and age-appropriate hands-on experiences.” A quality preschool will be noisy and busy. It may look chaotic to the untrained eye. Further looking will reveal real learning going on as children explore, investigate, manipulate, and try something over and over again. They truly are young scientists figuring out how the world works. If a child figures out something for himself he will remember it much better than if someone just tells him. As I saw on a sign in a preschool, “telling is not teaching”.
· “In a high-quality preschool, learning is embedded in activities….” This is probably the hardest concept to grasp. Children are learning numbers and letters, for example, just not always with paper and pencil. They learn letters through being read to, seeing words on their cubbies, name tags, place mats, doing letter puzzles, singing the alphabet song, and in general playing in a print-rich environment with many adults to answer their questions and stimulate their intellect. They learn counting through finger plays, counting how many children are sitting in circle, how many place mats to set at the table, how many blocks to make a tower, how many children are absent that day and on and on. The teachers do provide a curriculum – it just doesn’t look like high school or even elementary school. It looks like play and that is exactly what it should be. “The best early childhood programs use play to get at academics. One doesn’t rule out the other.”
· “When learning through play, progress isn’t gauged in terms of a right or wrong answer.” Preschool activities are usually open-ended. So a three year old may use the same materials, do some of the same activities or read the same books as a five year old, yet get something totally different out of them. Even children of the same age will be at different levels of developmental. Some four year olds recognize all the letters of the alphabet while others may recognize only the one at the beginning of their names. As long as children are in a rich environment with skilled adults, they will learn what they need to succeed. A love of learning and an excitement about life are more important to success in school than knowing particular facts or skills.
I have been involved in early childhood education for over twenty five years. Many things have changed in the field since I started, but the message that children learn through play has not changed.
If you have questions or concerns about your individual child and/or about the curriculum, talk with your teacher or me. Let’s keep doing what is best for children and let them play.
Carol
The words in quotation marks are from a Tacoma News Tribune article “Preschool Students Learn Best Through Curiosity-Building Play” from a Parent to Parent column by Betsy Flagler written a few years ag