All Work No Play and Other False Dichotomies

I just finished a week
of parent conferences. In every conference I discussed the number of
letters my students recognized, and how many letter sounds they could
produce on demand. Many of my students' parents wanted to know about
their behavior. In all of my conferences, though, I talked with parents
about how they could interact with their kids in ways that would
support literacy development that were fun. These included using magnet
letters, the newspaper, and books. One parent told me how she tried to
trick her son into learning his letters by asking him to identify the
letters on the Wheel of Fortune.

I also talked with
parents about what they could do that supported the less obvious areas
of reading development like vocabulary, comprehension, print tracking,
phonemic awareness, syllabication, and combining letter sounds. Many of
my parents had never considered the multiple skills involved with
reading beyond letter sound identification. The feeling that was
present across the board for all my parents was that parents wanted their
kids to learn how to read. For many of my students this will happen
eventually anyway, but for some, it might never happen unless I, as
their teacher, take a vested interest in making it happen.

Making it happen,
though, does not necessarily require what some might think it requires.
I have felt pressure to make sure my students have the basic skills
that can be taught through mind numbing repetition but these same
skills can be taught in fun ways too. What my students really to ensure that they to learn
how to read is a love of reading, which they may not get outside the
classroom. The desire to learn how to read is one of the most important
reasons why play must be a part of every child's daily routine.
Purposeful play combined with free play helps kids get excited about
stories. Often in my class, I hear the stories I have read replayed in the block area or dramatic play area. 
ScienceDaily
just published an article about the push down of test-based
accountability to pre-k. The primary author in this article highlights
what can be a detriment to learning to read if there isn't room for the
imagination in the classroom.

What Dyson calls the
“banning of the imagination” in schools may be influenced by what some
critics have called the “Baby Genius Edutainment Complex,” a cottage
industry of mind-enrichment products developed specifically for infants
and toddlers and marketed to anxious parents eager to give their
children’s cognitive abilities an early boost.

While Dyson does see
some value in teaching the ABCs to children in pre-kindergarten, she
thinks that trying to accelerate learning actually works against a
child’s development. Kindergarten and preschool, she said, should be a
place for children to experience play as intellectual inquiry, before
they get taken over by the tyranny of high-stakes testing.

Dyson said that having
an early-childhood curriculum reduced to isolated test scores or other
measurable pieces of information doesn’t take into account a child’s
interests or an ability to imagine, problem solve or negotiate with
other children, all of which are important social and intellectual
qualities.
The only weakness I see
in this argument is that Dyson believes accelerating learning works
against the child's development. I think we need to acknowledge that
some ways of pushing kids to learn how to read are not going to benefit
them in the long run. But, we also need to acknowledge that many
at-risk students start school with fewer hours of interaction around
literacy. Pre-k can and should work to increase the number and quality
of those interactions without taking on a drill mentality. At-risk kids
need to learn basic skills and higher level "thinking" skills
simultaneously. This is entirely possible and according to Education Sector , necessary, if we want at-risk kids to have the same types of opportunities for success later on.

Decades of research
reveals that there is, in fact, no reason to separate the acquisition
of learning core content and basic skills like reading and computation
from more advanced analytical and thinking skills, even in the earliest
grades.
It is not
whether we encourage play and imagination in school that is at issue,
it is why and how much. I think Dyson is on to something when she says,
"We have to intellectually engage kids. We have to give
them a sense of their own agency, their own capacity, and an ability to
ask questions and solve problems. So we have to give them more
open-ended activities that allow them the space they need to make sense
of things.”