Yesterday, my partner bought our three year old, S, a box of blank greeting cards (with owls on the front, of course). When they got home, S immediately announced she was going to write a card to Nana (my mother). She sat down with her box of cards and a pen, and scribbled a note, rather like this one. I didn’t get a photo of the exact card, but this is a good example.
A Mother’s Day card written by my 3-year-old daughter
I sat down next to her and wrote out the envelope, and then she put the stamp on and we took it to the mailbox. She was thrilled! Later in the afternoon, she wrote about six more cards.
I tell this story not to brag about how wonderful my daughter is (she is, but I also left out the hour long meltdown in the middle of this story), but to point out how play leads to competence.
This isn’t the first time she has “written” a card, though it’s the first time she got her own cards. In the past, she has drawn circles or tried to trace her hand, and been very proud of both efforts. But you can see from the photo that this time she is very clearly imitating writing. In fact, as far as she’s concerned, she is writing, although she knows that she’s not making real letters yet. You can see that her squiggles follow a pattern of rows, and they have curves and waves like adult writing. She also wrote from left to right and from top to bottom, just the way adults do. She talked the entire time about who the cards were for, so she knows the purpose of writing a card.
Our house is highly literate, and she is surrounded by books and by adults who read and write constantly (this is important, and we’ll come back to it), but we haven’t explicitly taught her anything about writing. We do have a set of sandpaper letters (a Montessori material that allows children to trace letters with their fingers), and when she asks, I’ll tell her the letter sound and show her how to trace it.
But mostly, she is learning by observing and playing, which is the normal way that children around the world learn just about everything (Gaskins and Paradise, 2010). In fact, in most traditional cultures around the world, explicit teaching is essentially non-existent. Adults expect children to observe everything going on around them (and there are few spaces where they are unwelcome), and then to imitate the adults through play and small-scale work in order to learn. And it works! Children learn the full range of culturally relevant skills and knowledge, including abstract ideas like cosmologies, from listening, watching, playing, and pitching in.
Unfortunately, this model of learning, has almost entirely disappeared in highly schooled, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. The notion that children learn by direct teaching, and by input and control by adults, means that we are liable to “take over” this sort of play and use it to our own ends, or eliminate it entirely.
Here are some ways I could become an obstacle to this play and its push toward intentional competence. See if any of them seem familiar to you.
I could refuse to give her the tools, telling her that they are for people who know how to write. (Unfortunately, I see this happen far too often in Montessori classrooms, when adults tell children something like: “Those are for children who already know how to write. If you want to draw, let me show you something you can do.”).
I could praise her writing and tell her how great it is. She knows she didn’t write real letters, and doesn’t need me pretending otherwise. (We did praise her, but it was about how kind it is to write cards to people you love.)
I could belittle her writing by pointing out that it’s pretend. It’s not pretend. As far as she’s concerned, she is writing, she’s just not doing it with letters yet.
I could take the pen from her and try to “help” her write a “real” note by taking dictation for her. (I tried this with one card. It did not go well. She’s interested in the act of “writing” and the recipient of the card, not the message.)
Perhaps worst of all, I could take this as my cue that she is “ready” to learn to read and write, and start trying to teach her letters, colonizing her play to for my own ends.
Unlike village children, for whom almost every relevant skill is readily observable through watching and listening, S probably is going to need some explicit instruction in order to crack the “code” of reading and writing. There is too much purely cognitive knowledge involved in literacy for most children to work out on their own.
But here’s the thing, we can provide explicit instruction without taking over and doing it on our schedule. S will continue to write, and it will become more and more like adult writing. She will continue to read by imitating and repeating and reading to “Baby” (a doll) and her infant sister. And as she notices more details and masters the reading skills she already has, she will ask about what she doesn’t understand. This may not follow any expert-approved pattern (for example, she is already an expert on exclamation points, despite knowing a few of her letters), but it will follow an S-approved pattern, and I fully expect that her own desire to be a competent member of our family and community will drive her to learn to read and write.
This isn’t to dismiss the value of a classroom community, nor of didactic materials like sandpaper letters. My children are lucky (from an academic perspective) to live in an extremely literate household with adults who model reading and writing. Writing is relevant to her world. Unfortunately, many children live in environments where they are told literacy is important to their future, but it is not important in their surroundings. This is where a classroom community can come in. Here, we have an opportunity to create a place where literacy is important, where grownups and older children use reading and writing on a daily basis, and where children are invited into the land of literacy. But we don’t have to view this as a kind battle against the child, in which the learning happens because adults drag the child down a step by step path of explicit instruction. Instead, we can invite children to play toward competence, and give them just the help they need.