All Work No Play and Other False Dichotomies by J.M. Holland

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.”