Week Six Readings

Week Six- Theme: 

How do very young children pragmatically use and apply the purposes, structures and features of early literacy and numeracy concepts through their play and everyday life experiences? 

This week's theme is all about teaching and learning about literacy and numeracy through everyday play activities. The two readings I chose for this week reflect this theme, and expand on my own opinions about play-based learning. 

I believe schools and pre-schools should have a greater focus on teaching students how to apply the concepts and ideas they are learning to real-world settings. This way students not only learn the curriculum, but they are taught to be lifelong learners, critical thinkers, and to use their learning practically throuought their life. Play-based learning allows this, letting children explore concepts and ideas in their own play scenarios, or teacher-initiated play settings, and creating connections between these ideas and how to use them in the real-world. 

Reading One

Wolff, Ann L & Wimer, Nancy. (2009). Shopping for Mathematics in Consumer Town. Young Children, 64(3), 34-38. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/197640000?accountid=1091. 

I chose this article because I was interested in reading about the teaching of maths and numeracy to senior high school and preschool students simultaneously.

This article focuses on a project undertaken by year 12 students and kindergarten students to build ‘Consumer Town’, a town made up of cardboard boxes and paper signs, as a joint hands-on numeracy learning experience. The teachers in this project decided on an activity to combat the idea that ‘there is sometimes a disconnect between real-world applications and the material covered in standards-based teaching’ (p. 34). This, for me, was a significant point, emphasising and supporting my view that concepts and ideas learned in the classroom need to be applied to everyday, real-world scenarios in order to be the most useful for students later in life. 

During the project the high school students learned about paycheques, budgeting, shopping, taxes, home and car ownership, banking and savings. The preschool students were introduced to money, buying, selling, numbers, counting, subtracting, owning, and these geometrical concepts

• Recognising, naming, building, drawing, comparing, and sorting three-dimensional shapes
• Finding and naming locations with simple relationships such as near to
•  Recognising and creating shapes that have symmetry
• Recognising and representing shapes from different perspectives and
• Recognising geometric shapes and structures in the environment and specifying their location

(p. 35) 

 Additional important points in the article for me were:

• A high school student's recognition that young children learn from observing everyday things (such as how their parents shop, etc)
• the emphasis on hands-on, interactive, student-owned learning
• the teachers' recognised things to improve on (such as the kindergarten students not being introduced to the scarcity of money), and thought of ways to improve on these next time (the idea of Work Town alongside Consumer Town)

Reading about the high school and preschool students working together in the same project to better their individual numeracy skills was very engaging and interesting for me. I was able to see how this project touched upon many different aspects of numeracy that I perhaps wouldn’t have thought of (like the geometrical concepts), and it was uplifting to read about the collaboration between the older and younger students. I think this reading really expanded on my ideas about teaching numeracy to young children and I connected with the idea of a hands-on, interactive, student owned learning project, with applications to the real world. 

This project, or similar projects, could be altered to work with only preschool students, with young children having a more active role in creating the town, introducing the concepts of construction, building, architecture, planning, and structure (among others) to the project. I really liked the idea of Work Town running next to Consumer Town to better teach the value of money to children. I think the ideas behind this project are useful in creating an engaging activity for children of all ages and taking mathematical concepts and applying them to the real world, in short teaching children to be numerate, not just good at maths. 

Reading Two

Hanline, M. F. (2001). Supporting Emergent Literacy in Play-Based Activities. Young Exceptional Children, 4(10), 10-15. doi: 10.1177/109625060100400402.

I chose this reading to further my understanding of how everyday play activities can be linked to learning about literacy for young children, and to further my understanding about emergent literacy. 

The main point of this article was to show how aspects of play help develop pre-writing/reading literacy in young children. Three main types of play were looked at, block or microsymbolic play, macrosymbolic play, and fluid construction play. 

Microsymbolic Play

Microsymbolic play is described as play involving replicated objects, such as miniature vehicles, animals, or people, and as being often combined with blocks. This play helps develop literacy in children through:

• enhancing visual discrimination
•  the development of fine motor strength and coordination
• creating an environment that encourages oral communication
• serving as an introduction to macrosymbolic play

(p. 12)

Macrosymbolic Play

Macrosymbolic play is pretend play, play where children assume pretend roles, usually in the sociodramatic area of early childhood programs. This area of play helps develop literacy through:

• refining fine, motor, and visual skills critical to reading and writing
• providing an environment to develop

o   symbolic abilities

o   oral language skills

(p. 13)

Fluid Construction Play

Through construction play children are able to represent ideas through a medium, or use objects to build. Fluid construction play is construction play with materials that change, or can be altered to change shape and form, such as paint, crayons, water, sand, etc. This form of play can enhance literacy skills through:

• developing motor and visual skills
• encourage symbolic thinking and social play that supports language development
• can involve drawing or scribbling (precursor to writing)

(p. 13)

In addition to these, the authors’ suggest the introduction of writing and reading materials in all aspects of play to help further develop literacy in young children. They also argue that the Intensity (or the amount of time children are able to experience different play activities) and the Density (or the variety of ways children experience play activities) are also important considerations when using play to develop literacy.

These play scenarios are found in many different early childhood settings, and the introduction of reading and writing materials near these activities should be considered for the gradual development of literacy in children. Like last week’s literacy reading, there is an emphasis on not directly teaching reading and writing to children but on introducing children to literacy concepts and principles, and developing the skills necessary for reading and writing later on.