The Bridge to School

Aligning Teaching with Development for Ages Four to Six

Claire Bainer, Liisa Hale, Gail Myers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415789578
• eBook ISBN: 9781351838535
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

The Bridge to School provides concise, targeted information for teachers who work in PreK, Transitional Kindergarten, or Kindergarten settings, covering both the why and the how of play in classrooms, along with insights into how the normal development of 4-to-6-year-olds is manifested and how teachers can harness and work with those typical needs and behaviors. This powerful professional resource includes theories of child development, brain development, and the value of play-based learning, but the majority of the content is practical classroom strategies that fall in line with ECERS and allow for appropriate academic skill building.

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Chapter 1
How Children Learn to Learn

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Key Information in this Chapter

• Brain development and its effect on the child’s learning styles and abilities

• Why play enhances classrooms and learning for young children

• Developmental needs and capacities

• The teacher’s role in orchestrating an effective balance of play and instruction

• Explaining the learning in your classroom to parents and colleagues

Our mature, educated adult brains have ideas about how we go about learning. If we are pursuing an academic subject we do research or listen to lectures. If we are learning how to fix a car, we might read but we will also find a good mechanic to demonstrate techniques, answer our questions, and then guide our practice. If we take up golf we might watch videos and hire a pro to coach us as we learn to drive and putt; the coach may also suggest we work on foundational skills like balance, strength, and coordination. We have many strategies at hand, and can pick and choose the best ones for each job.

Yet when we began life we could only learn by taking in a random assortment of information through our senses, and could only communicate by crying. Neuroscientists now know that brains reach full maturity around the age of 25, two decades after children typically enter Kindergarten—and still, babies learn most of their strategies for learning in the first five years of life. Dr. Alison Gopnik says “We learned most of what we need to know a long time before Kindergarten. As adults we can survive in our particular world because as children we figured out how it works.”¹ How is it that this immature brain moves in just five years from a single strategy for getting its needs met—crying—to the multiple competencies of formulating its needs or ideas into a cohesive thought, expressing that thought in words, taking in the reaction of others to those words, then responding by modulating its first thought and articulating a new one? Typically, children all over the world develop all these skills without “study” or “lessons”—they learn by watching and listening to people around them, copying behaviors they see (like the aspiring mechanic), practicing the words they hear, and receiving coaching in the challenging moment from the pros in their lives—adults and older children.

For 100 years observant teachers have known that young children learn best when they are in the company of competent, caring and responsive adults who guide and support, but only occasionally direct, the children’s activities. They have seen that when children select their own activities—which the adult labels as play—they work hard to achieve their goals and learn more as a result. Teachers also observe that if children set goals that are too challenging they comfortably reframe them so they can be achieved with self-esteem intact. Teachers of babies, toddlers and preschoolers learn as part of their teacher education how to set up effective, intentional, constructive play. Yet even though we know now from neuroscience as well as observation that this is the best way for children to learn, most teacher preparation fails to include this vital information.

The trend in education has been to ask 4-year-olds to act like 6-year-olds, as if they are no longer governed by the rules of biology and development. Rather than honor the learning style of 4-year-olds as something different than that of 6-year-olds it has simply been labeled inadequate. As children grow from the pre-Kindergarten age of 4 they are still learning the most from their own self-directed play; by the time they enter first grade around age 6 they are beginning to learn other ways to learn. What is it that children need to learn when they are 4 or 5, and why is it more effective to teach it through play than through lessons?

Defining and Valuing Play

While everyone has an idea of what the word “play” means, in the world of early education it refers to a very specific type of activity. When we say “play” we mean an activity that is:

• freely chosen,

• self-structured, and

• self-directed.

To be freely chosen, there must be a multitude of options available; doing a puzzle is freely chosen if a child had the option of puzzles, blocks, dollhouse or books, but it does not meet the standard if every child in the room was told “now do a puzzle.” To be self-structured means the child (or a group of children in agreement as they become cooperative players) decides how to approach the activity; if she can start her jigsaw puzzle any way she wants, maybe constructing the dog in the middle first, it’s self-structured, but if she is told she must start by putting the straight edges together it is not. To be self-directed means the child is in charge of the experience, and will change it to suit his own learning capacity and the relationships he has with others.

When the teacher directs the children’s activity, even if they are using play materials like blocks or balls or tempera paint, it fails to meet this definition of play. Throughout this book any reference to play is based on this definition. Children “self-teach” through free play on the playground at recess—there is a growth opportunity every time a group decides to play hopscotch and needs to negotiate turns and rules—but greater growth comes with the teacher’s guidance when she has selected play materials that will advance the children’s skills and understanding in specific areas she has identified, and where she can step in with a timely comment that supports or expands the play and the child’s understanding of how to interact with other people in his world. Chapter 2 will delve more deeply into this concept of Guided Play.

The learning that comes through play is hard to measure but is a foundation for life skills just as much as academic skills. It is easy to measure whether or not a child can count to 10—but the ability to count to 10 is just rote recitation with little value for a child who does not understand one-to-one correspondence, or that 8 represents more of something than 6 does. It is easier to count the number of letters that a child can name than to measure whether he can listen to a story and grasp its content—but naming letters is only a small piece towards the big goal of enticing a child into the vast world that lives in stories and books.

It can sound like contradictory advice to be told to “teach through play” and at the same time be told not to direct the play. How does one teach through play without telling a child what to do? The best way to visualize this is that the teacher guides the play, by putting out materials that will elicit the kind of play that she wants to see and by adding information or materials as the play develops. For example, if she wants the children to learn to talk to each other in the dramatic play area she will put out props that support interpersonal relationships—dolls and dishes, office supplies and keyboards, toolboxes and steering wheels. (She will not put out light sabers, because she knows that they are likely to lead to fighting play rather than friendly conversation!) As she sees children picking up the toolboxes and steering wheels she can step back if they are happily sharing ideas to make cars out of the blocks and drive on a camping trip. But if she notices that they pick up those items and then seem short of play ideas she may just happen to come by and say “Uh-oh, is your car broken?” Suddenly the children have a framing idea and as they begin to embrace it and plan their play the teacher can step out again. Subsequent chapters will provide the teacher with many more strategies to guide play.

Research Supporting Play-Based Learning

In the 1970s Germany experimented with shifting from its play-based Kindergartens to early learning centers that focused on cognitive achievement. When they compared the children of 50 such Kindergartens with those in 50 play-based Kindergartens, they found that:

by age ten the children who had played excelled over the others in a host of ways. They were more advanced in reading and mathematics and they were better adjusted socially and emotionally in school. They excelled in creativity and intelligence, oral expression, and “industry.” As a result of this study German kindergartens returned to being play-based again.²

Daniel Goleman’s 1995 book Emotional Intelligence³ broadly introduced Americans to the concept that mastery of what are now known as “soft skills” predicts life success more accurately than test scores or grades. Goleman cited multiple examples of people with high cognitive intelligence and test scores failing to achieve as much as others with only average intelligence, but with stronger interpersonal skills. Understanding people, he argued, was perhaps more important in managing one’s life than high scores in academic exams. In fact, high intelligence without some sense of self-awareness and ability to control one’s impulses interferes with personal success—a child who requires instant gratification will choose to play a video game rather than study for tomorrow’s test, sometimes leading to academic failure despite high intelligence.

Once again, for many generations observant preschool teachers had been quite sure that this was true, but they lacked the science to prove it and lost ground to policy-makers pushing brain-focused, teacher-led instruction to younger and younger children. Since the early 1960s there has been a growing cascade of proof that success has a lot more to do with self-control, self-esteem, social skills, flexible thinking, curiosity, creativity and strong executive function in the brain than it has to do with innate intelligence; once a child has those pieces in place teaching math and reading is easy. In addition we have learned that 4-year-old brains really are biologically not ready to learn through the same methods that work for most 6- or 7-year-olds.

Summaries of the Research

• The “marshmallow test” in the 1960s by Stanford University psychologist Walter Mischel. In this experiment, the adult left a 4-year-old in a room with a treat on the table in front of him, saying the child could eat it if he wanted—but if he would wait until the experimenter returned then he could have two marshmallows. Dr. Mischel found in follow-up studies that children who could delay gratification at age 4 earned significantly higher scores on their SATs when they were seniors in high school!

• The Perry Preschool project.⁴ In 1962 the HighScope Perry Preschool Program out of Ypsilanti Michigan identified children from low-income homes deemed at risk for school failure based on environmental factors and low IQ scores. Half the children attended a play-based half-day program taught by well-educated preschool teachers for two years. The lives of these children have been followed for 40 years along with the control group who did not experience guided preschool play, with reports periodically issued about their progress in life. The researchers were a little disappointed when they evaluated the children after the first few years of elementary school, as the differences between the two groups of children were quite small. However, each successive round of research, conducted in five-year intervals, found the quality of life of the Perry Preschool participants diverging more markedly from the children in the control group. By age 40, the study found that those who had been enrolled in the Perry Preschool had higher earnings, were more likely to hold a job, had committed fewer crimes, and were more likely to have graduated from high school than adults who did not have the play experience in preschool. Compared to the control group:

○ At the age of 5, over twice as many Perry Preschool children tested with an average IQ or higher.

○ At the age of 10, less than half as many Perry Preschool children had been held back a grade or placed in Special Education.

○ At the age of 15, three times as many Perry Preschool children mastered basic achievement tests...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Preface
• Help! Index
• 1 How Children Learn to Learn
• 2 The 3R Framework
• 3 Guiding and Growing the Whole Child
• 4 The Art of Teaching Self-Control
• 5 Language that Supports Young Children
• 6 The Bridge from Play to Instruction, and Instruction to Play
• Appendix 1: Typical Patterns in Development from Ages Four to Six
• Appendix 2: Play-Based Learning that Supports Academic Success
• Appendix 3: Suggested Additional Reading or Viewing 190 Glossary
• Glossary