S8 E2 - 5 Early Years Practices That Deserve a Comeback: Part 2

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Hello and welcome back to the Structured Literacy Podcast recorded here in Pataway Burnie on the lands of the Palawa people. What you're about to hear is part two of a two-part series about 5 early years practices that I think deserve a comeback. In the first episode, I shared some musings for you on big books and puppets. And in this episode, we are going to kick off with a discussion of dramatic play. I hope you enjoy this little series. I am an early years teacher at heart, I cannot lie. I still drive past and see people with amazing fridge boxes on the side of the road and think, oh wow, we could do something wonderful with those. Over the years, I've come to like the big people too, but there's something about that early years classroom that is so very special.

Why Dramatic Play Still Matters

So let's get started with a discussion about dramatic play. Number three on the list of things that we may have prematurely let go is dramatic play. We know that knowledge building is important for children's comprehension of text. What children know shapes what they can understand. We also know that children come to us having had very different experiences of the world, and many of the places and experiences that they meet in books are completely new to some of them. Reading a shared nonfiction text about cafes is great, but there's no better way to help children really understand what happens in a cafe than to set up a couple of tables and have students give and take orders from each other. If the main inference you need the children to get in order to understand the text is based on this knowledge of a cafe, we need to ensure that knowledge, not assume it. When we immerse children in an actual experience, suddenly words like menu and customer have moved off the page and children are using them and they understand them.

Linking Play To Text Knowledge

Now these are experiences that so many of us as parents take for granted as normal play for our young children. Setting up a shop in the lounge room, playing doctors with a teddy bear, or making cups of pretend tea. For some of our students, that kind of play hasn't been part of their lives before school. But we can absolutely include it in our classrooms and connect it to real learning. This one needs some nuance because I've been very clear about play in the past, and I stand by what I've written and what I have said. That is, while play can be a valuable opportunity for inclusion and for having real-world experiences to build understanding, and embedding literacy into that play can be a good thing to do. This is not literacy instruction. That's what the literacy block is for. Dramatic play doesn't teach children to read, it can help them focus attention and fully engage their thinking on something in a way that maybe just can't be replicated with reading a nonfiction text aloud.

And I have to be really honest about the research. The evidence for play causing gains in areas like language and reasoning and academics is perhaps weaker than many of us would have assumed. But remember, I'm not talking about setting up a home corner with a dress-up box and letting the kids go for it. I'm talking about direct, purposeful links to the learning at hand, usually with a text-based unit as the main connection. In practice, it would look like reading the nonfiction text about cafes first and talking about the vocabulary. Then we might set up those tables with the menus, but we're not spending three lessons making menus and colouring in placemats. We're deepening understanding. You can then model how this all works and model the language too: "Would you like a large juice or a small one? I'll write that down on my order pad." And then after the play, bring the children back together to talk about what happened using the words that they've just been practicing. I also want to set a clear boundary about time on this. This task would not live in the literacy block. This is an after-lunch opportunity, not an instead of our phonics lesson opportunity.

Play Supports Writing Through Talk

There's one more benefit of this kind of thing that I want to discuss, and that is the connection between hands-on experience and writing. If you've done my Reading Success in the Early Primary Years course, or you've read my book, you may remember me talking about the process of do, talk, record. It was a mantra of practice in my early days teaching in remote schools in the Northern Territory, and I think it's a really good idea to keep in mind. Providing a hands-on opportunity to really experience an idea or situation, and then having students talk about it is a wonderful way to help lighten cognitive load for writing. All of that doing and that talking helps firm up the ideation piece of writing so that the students can focus on the transcription and get something meaningful onto the page.

A terrific early years teacher, Sandy, now retired, taught her students our Jetty Jumping unit in her multi-age class. For design and technology, she had them work together to make a jetty out of duplo blocks, and each child had their own picture of Milla, the main character. Then they used this as the basis to retell the story and prepare for their own writing, with the children taking turns to move their character around and discuss what she was doing. So Sandy had the double benefit of design and technology, the making part, and the students got the benefit of what they viewed as a fun activity, but actually had really strong links to the learning in the text-based unit.

Singing Without A Screen

Number four on this list is singing without a screen. And what I'm talking about here is singing with just our voices, not watching a video that goes with it. An older colleague once said to me, in my day, we used to sing nursery rhymes, not watch them. And that gave me the biggest Aha! moment. From that day on, the screen was turned off when my students were singing nursery rhymes. When we show a video clip or a cartoon clip that accompanies a song, the focus is invariably going to shift away from listening and producing words to consuming the visual content. And for many of the children, the pictures are so distracting that they're barely attending to the song at all.

When I spoke with my early years teacher friends in preparation for this episode, every one of them said that they used to have so many songs built into the day that they sang and the children joined in with. The songs covered everything from walking into the classroom to sitting on the mat. There was a song for packing away and another one for lining up. And somewhere along the way, a lot of that seems to have disappeared. We can use songs in classroom transitions to guide students' behaviour and give them a phonological awareness workout at the same time. For example, you can sing something like, Can you chop it? Can you chop it? Can you chop your name to the tune of open shut them? And I don't have a good singing voice, so I'm not going to subject you to that. But then you have them chop out the syllables of their name before they go and get their bag. Or you can sing A wibbly wobbly woo, an elephant sat on you, substituting the first sound of a child's name so the class has to work out who the elephant sat on. This has children moving calmly one at a time, and everyone gets another little bit of a rep on some phonological awareness. They don't have to even be proper songs, just make them up. The children don't know the difference and they quite like it.

What Research Says About Rhythm

So, what does the research say about songs and language? Well, Lawson-Adams, Dickinson, and Donner published a paper in 2022 where they taught preschool children new words using either picture cards alone or songs, which were either sung or rhythmically spoken. The children's basic recognition of the words was similar across all three conditions. But both the songs and the spoken rhythmic chant led to deeper word knowledge than the picture cards and speaking alone. And this is supported by other research that has shown that rhythm is helpful when we want language to stick. I do want to add a word of caution. Singing won't help children to read, and I'd never suggest that it does. Songs are, however, a joyful, low-cost vehicle for repeating language, learning new words, and maybe playing with the sounds in words, which is exactly what many of our students need more of.

Nursery Rhymes For Phonology

Number five, the last item on my list is nursery rhymes. They have been a part of early years classrooms forever, and there's a good reason for that. One of the things we hear from teachers is how few nursery rhymes children seem to know when they arrive in the Foundation classroom. Children who once would have arrived knowing Little Miss Muffet and Little Bo Peep just don't know them anymore. Now, this is bad news that is so easy to address. Learning to recite nursery rhymes provides a real boost for developing phonological sensitivity, including rhyming awareness and syllable division. It builds vocabulary and early comprehension if used purposefully. Popping a YouTube clip of nursery rhymes on the board isn't enough. Students need to be actively engaged in learning them and using them. Nursery rhymes are valuable for other reasons too. They carry the rhythm and the natural rise and fall of spoken language. They contain words that children wouldn't have heard otherwise. I don't know how many four-year-olds regularly use the word tuffet or curds and whey in conversation, but we can broaden their vocabulary learning with rhymes such as the old faithfuls.

Many rhymes include a beginning, a middle, and end, and they give children a shared set of words and stories that they can join in with from the very first days at school. Now, in the Resource Room, we have two units for Foundation built around nursery rhymes because we believe strongly in their value for oral language and early phonological awareness, and so we've built robust units out of them. But you can take this beyond the text-based unit, have a rhyme of the week, say it together every day until the children know it by heart. Stop just before the rhyming word and let the class finish the line. Swap out a word and see who notices. Send it home so families can say them together. Choose them thoughtfully, though, because some of the traditional ones have some concepts we'd rather leave behind. But do include rhymes and songs from languages and cultures of the children in your room. And of course, remember, turn the screen off. And all of this rhyming and mucking around with language and interacting and playing, and all of this brings us back to the curriculum. Remember that language: Explore and replicate the rhythms and sound patterns of literary texts, such as poems, rhymes, and songs. So bringing nursery rhymes back in a really big way in your classroom and having all of the children learn them isn't just fun. It's actually about good learning too.

Returning To Purposeful Practices

So back to the question we started with. What if the answer, or some of the answer, to the language challenges that we're seeing in so many of our Foundation students isn't about getting a new program, but a return to some of the practices that we may have let go of for a variety of reasons. Now, I don't think that these on their own will solve every language difficulty, but every one of these practices increases the children's chance to hear and participate in rich language experiences so that they can learn to use language meaningfully. And every one of these ideas works alongside or within explicit systematic teaching of the code and early reading and writing. When we think about practices we may have let go of, it's not about casting judgement and having to be in some camp about, "Oh, I'm a play person" or, "I'm a structured literacy person." It's about what is the purpose of the activity or the task or the practice. What do we want the children to learn and does it help them learn it? If the answer is yes, and we can use it without taking away from the explicit teaching our students need, then I think it deserves a place in our classroom.

So while you're having a well-earned rest these holidays, maybe take a quick mental walk through the storeroom or the back cupboards in the library at school. Is there a big book easel hiding behind those assessment folders? Is there a puppet that hasn't seen daylight since 2019? Or will you plan to teach one of our nursery rhyme units in the Resource Room in Term 4? Alright, everybody, that is it from me in this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast. Until next time, happy teaching.

References:

Lawson-Adams, Jessica & Dickinson, David & Donner, J.. (2022). Sing it or speak it?: The effects of sung and rhythmically spoken songs on preschool children's word learning. Early Childhood Research Quarterly. 58. 87-102. 10.1016/j.ecresq.2021.06.008.