teacher I had not heard of before. Then, thanks to @FSSimon,
I saw her name again - Vivian Paley. And I'm glad I did. Thank you, Fran, for
introducing me to my new favorite education writer!
research, based on tape recording her students daily, provides a rare
window into the minds of young children. She has called "play" the love
of her life and her book, You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, A Child’s
Work: The Importance of Fantasy Play, discusses how her students
grasp to understand community and acceptance, and its opposite –
exclusion. These are incredibly hard concepts to understand – even for
adults – and here she is discovering how children do it at 4 years old!
Paley
has said, "Every species practices being young." Humans practice the
same way other species do, with the added dimension of imaginative play.
Children practice pretending to be someone else, somewhere else. They
step outside of themselves and invent abstract thought. Children are
inventing learning as they play with ideas.
"I am
intended to have my own ideas," Paley says, speaking as one of her
subjects in this video. "That's why I play the way I
do, to show myself what my ideas are and how necessary I am to the
community."
When our at-risk students come to Head Start, we
don't have the luxury of time. In many circumstances, we are trying to
pack three years of play into nine months of school. You can't do that
and just play in a classroom. So we try to find balance and "teach" some
basic readiness skills like recognizing letters, numbers, colors,
shapes, and make our lessons as "fun" as possible. But there is a
difference between play and fun. Play occurs in children naturally when
they are ready, teaching happens when the teacher is ready, and it will
never, ever be as powerful as a child "inventing learning" for
themselves.
Image: http://www.curry.edu/Academics/Majors+Minors+and+Departments/Education/Features/Vivian+Paley.htm
