Judith Schickedanz on designing meaningful play for children

I observed recently in a preschool classroom where four boys spent all of center time crashing vehicles on the road they had built in between two large hollow ramp blocks positioned on two chair seats. A tub of books about buildings sat nearby. Two books, opened to show magnificent bridges, were on display. Not a single boy looked at a book.

In another classroom in a different preschool, two girls were lassoed around their necks by two boys playing with neckties as the girls cooked “dinner” and played with babies. A teacher suggested that the boys dress up and join the girls for dinner. They ignored the suggestion, but stopped using their neckties to bother the girls. After the teacher left the area, the boys resumed their earlier behavior. Soon, one girl said to the other, “Let’s go someplace else. It’s not fun here.”

Teachers must guide children’s play. This skill requires knowing how to design learning contexts that support constructive and productive play, and how to support children in acquiring knowledge to take to their play. Teachers need not be shy about influencing children’s interests and thus play content. Field trips, guests, and books come to mind as essential resources.

Play benefits from teacher involvement, but direct engagement with children as they play falls flat when teachers try to plaster on academic skill learning. Preschoolers are not interested in commentary about the shapes or sizes of blocks while playing. Their minds are occupied with finishing the fire engine and playing “fire fighter.” The various shapes and sizes of blocks get children’s focused attention only if they run out of one kind and must make others work. Children also become aware of block shapes and sizes as they put blocks away on shelves organized by block kind.

Children need more “input” to learn enough about shapes and sizes. Teachers need not apologize for contriving playful experiences not thought of by the children. I once observed the use of small, colored blocks on a tabletop in conjunction with “tower cards” made with colored construction paper shapes. The children were told that some towers “worked” (i.e., stood up) and that others did not. One “tower card” showed an equilateral triangle sitting on one of its corners with a square (one face of the cube blocks at the children’s disposal) on top of it. A child’s attempted tower with this arrangement did not “work.” Interested children used geometric shapes in construction paper colors, matching the 3-D blocks available, to make more “tower cards.” Some children made both “funny towers” and those that “worked.“ The children’s engagement was deep. So what if the activity was the teacher’s idea?

More than a mere “return to play” is needed to set things right in today’s preschool classrooms. Teachers must design a variety of play contexts to teach the academics preschoolers need while prompting problem-solving, cooperative play with peers, and sheer delight in learning. As a consequence of our having added math and literacy foundations, and more about family and culture, and the science of child development, we’ve lost capacity to help teachers learn the craft of teaching preschoolers, thinking, perhaps, that this need not be taught to teachers that are better prepared academically. Maybe we need to go back to the drawing board.

Judith Schickedanz, a professor at Boston University in the Department of Literacy and Language, Counseling and Development, is the author of Much More than the ABC’s and Increasing the Power of Instruction: Integration of Language, Literacy, and Math Across the Preschool Day (NAEYC, 1999; and 2008) and co-author of Writing in Preschool: Orchestrating Meaning and Marks (IRA, 2009). Schickedanz serves as a literacy consultant to several Early Reading First projects.