The article below is excerpted from this highly recommended book: Imagination and Play in the Electronic Age, by Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer. Directors and teachers will appreciate all of their groundbreaking research; the book is well worth the buy. It’s published by Harvard University Press and available at Amazon.com. - Editor
In our previous chapters we emphasized the importance of play and its role in imagination, and how the electronic media, the “less palpable” influences, may have affected the consciousness of children. We believe that imaginative play can be taught, and along with adult guidance, can lead to the growth of cognitive, social and emotional skills.
The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has emphasized early testing and the importance of emergent literacy curricula including phonological awareness for preschoolers. The pressure on Head Start and other early childhood centers to meet the demands of the Act has led to the substitution of repetitive drill for pretend play in many of these settings, and for standardized yearly assessment of those preschoolers attending Head Start. As we talk to parents and teachers, we are finding more and more that very young children are becoming tense and anxious as they enter kindergarten. One reason for this is that the cognitive demands have increased to the point where free play has been virtually eliminated from the curriculum. We had the opportunity to look at the requirements for kindergartners in one school system. We were stunned to see that these five-year-olds are expected to create graphs, read high frequency words, draw pictures accompanied by written sentences, and dictate full sentences among other cognitive demands that seem developmentally inappropriate.
In this chapter, we present an argument for the use of guided play as one technique for learning basic skills that are suitable for preschoolers.
First, let us peek in on a child who attends a child care center where free play is valued. Susan is playing "bus". Seated on cushions on the floor are three “passengers,” Susan's favorite Raggedy Ann doll, a well-worn tiger, and a teddy bear. Before Susan takes her seat in the front of the bus, she asks her passengers for money, counts the pretend dollars out loud from 1 to 10, and says "Thank you" to each “playmate.” After Susan puts the money in a little box, she begins to “drive.” She is making lots of noises and swaying her body, pretending that she is steering around curves and going up and down hills. Susan calls out the names of the places she pretends to pass, "library," "school," "McDonalds," "fire station," "zoo." "Bus" is one of Susan's favorite pretend games. She can play it alone or with a friend on a play date.
At our Research Center at Yale University, we have developed a series of imaginative games such as “Bus” that encompass social skills, colors, numbers, shapes, vocabulary, letter recognition, and identification of emotions. These are the skills that the National Association for the Education for Young Children (NAEYC) deems important for readying children for school (Raden, 1999). We proposed that children could learn these skills through playing make-believe games and subsequently, they would also show improvement in persistence, cooperation, turn taking, sharing, independence, and control of aggression. But, most of all, children who play make-believe are having fun. They are also increasing their capacity for imagination and fantasy.
Teaching Cognitive Skills Through Guided Play
Why is it important to help preschoolers learn some of the cognitive skills they will need in kindergarten? Research indicates that children who have mastered rudimentary skills, such as identifying letters and numbers, are more likely to learn to read, write, and calculate earlier and more proficiently than those who have not (Siegler and Richards, 1982). In an excellent monograph discussing the research, theory, and practice relevant to how children learn to read English, the authors state that children who perform well on tasks that involve phonological awareness (deciding if two words rhyme and the recognition that two words start and end with the same letter) do markedly better in early reading than children who have difficulty with these tasks (Rayner et al, 2001). Although we are not advocating teaching reading to preschoolers, we are in favor of young children becoming familiar with books, learning the names of letters, and recognizing that these letters relate to words in a book. And of course we strongly favor parents reading to their children each day and offering encouragement to their children to engage in imaginative play.
"Children who experienced such a curriculum early on did significantly better at the end of their sixth year in school than children who had been exposed to a more academic curriculum in preschool."
What is so striking to us is that during free play periods, many preschool children we observed were wandering around the classrooms from activity to activity in an aimless fashion. We do not think it is necessary for the teacher to be intervening during every moment of a child’s play, but certainly some of this guidance could benefit the child who has very little parental mediation at home. Many of the teachers sat on the sidelines and interceded only if aggressive behavior was evident.
Rarely did we see teachers using this free play period as an opportunity to interject some ideas or suggestions that could help the children play more imaginatively and use their play scripts to learn some skills. For example, when we watched some boys building a dog house, there was a chance for the teacher to ask some questions about the size and shape of the blocks, how many blocks were needed, or to learn some new words, such as dog leash, dog catcher, kennel, roof, ramp, and dog collar. During a game of "going to the store," it would have been appropriate for the teacher to help define the words needed to play the game, such as "customer," "cashier." The teacher might even have had the children identify the items they bought by naming the first letters of each, such as "b" is for ball, or "c" is for cup or car, or encouraged the children to count out play money when they made their purchases, thereby learning one-to-one number and object correspondence. Instead, the teacher sat by passively, only interceding when the children would fight about who was in charge.
In a game like "store" there is ample opportunity to teach about all the elements needed in shopping -- making up a name for the store, setting up the merchandise, choosing the roles for each child, opening the store, buying the items, paying for them, counting out the money and closing the store. In addition, cooperation, taking turns, and the use of civilities such as "thank you" and "you are welcome" could be part of this make-believe game. In their later replaying of the game, children might naturally practice new words and “appropriate social behaviors” while at the same time adding in their own variations and novelty.
When the children have a script in mind, the play flows more evenly. Preschoolers’ pretend play that involved strategies implicitly included in the play scenarios were more successful than when children stopped their play to discuss explicit suggestions as a study by Sawyer (1997) demonstrated. Thus, if the children have an idea before they begin their game, (as in our “store” story) they tend to play without constant interruptions. A teacher or parent can supply ideas for a game before the game actually begins. If the children have a story in mind based on a book that was read to them or even after exposure to an educational TV program, they are apt to play the game more smoothly and, hopefully, introduce some improvisations as they go along.
Pretend play fosters language use and takes place within social contexts (Bergen, 2001). We are not advocating that teachers or parents overwhelm the children with their questions and probing, but certainly in subtle ways a teacher or parent can interject some ideas so that the play becomes richer for the children and some useful learning may follow. Indeed, the adult is instrumental in helping children to keep a game going and to learn from their play as Parker et al (1999) found when links between parent-child relationship, home learning environment and school readiness were examined.
Bert van Oers (1999) suggests that play, which is a complex process, can prepare children for learning, but that a teacher must not disturb the play itself. Teachers and parents can assist children in how to use schematic representations meaningfully and reflectively in their play activities. It is essential that the adult allows the game to flow, and if the child chooses to change the storyline, this is acceptable. The pretend play, by and large, is in the child’s control. In her early work in South Africa observing mothers and children during play, Diane Shmukler (1981) found an optimal point for the mother's facilitation. When mothers are too intrusive, the child plays less imaginatively than when the parent makes a suggestion, withdraws, and allows the child to continue on his own. Many times we have observed children pulling back from play when their parents intervened too much and took over the play game, or became too silly, moving out of their adult roles.
Recent research by Macron (2002) suggests how important it is for a preschool curriculum to be child-initiated. This means that the teacher facilitates learning by allowing children to actively direct the focus of learning. The teacher in the study was a facilitator, and could still ask questions and mediate, but the child’s interests were paramount in choice of materials. Children who experienced such a curriculum early on did significantly better at the end of their sixth year in school than children who had been exposed to a more academic curriculum in preschool. To repeat, we are not suggesting that guided play be carried out continuously by the parent when a child plays at home or even by the teacher in the free play periods in the classroom. In school, it can take place for a few minutes during each play period, and the teacher can use guided play with different children each time. If this were a part of the curriculum over the year, we believe that much incidental learning could take place in an atmosphere of enjoyment so that children would be motivated to repeat the games on their own and, in effect, practice the new words and activities naturally.
Dorothy G. Singer is Senior Research Scientist in Psychology at Yale University.
Jerome L. Singer is Professor Emeritus in Psychology at Yale University. They co-direct the Yale Family Television Research and Consultation Center.
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