Many parents and policy leaders agree that quality
childcare and preschool are important for young children,
so they come to kindergarten ready to learn. But few
can explain what "quality" looks like
as well as Sue Bredekamp, a child development expert
who helped develop the National Association for the
Education of Young Children's standards for
developmentally appropriate practices for young children's
programs.
Bredekamp is currently the Director of Research at
the Council for Professional Recognition. She talked
with Connect for Kids about what it takes to ensure
young children become good learners and readers.
Five Fingers
Bredekamp says that understanding the way young children
learn is easy—as easy as counting the fingers
on one hand. Each finger represents a behavior that
a good teacher will engage in with children every
day:
The thumb represents talking. Just as the thumb is
key to using our hands, talking is fundamental to
learning, especially for literacy. It is through language
that babies and toddlers build their relationships
with others and build the foundation for learning
to think, communicate, read and write.
Next is the pointer finger. That stands for play.
Play is the natural activity of children, and is essential
to their learning about their world. Play teaches
children physics—what drops, what breaks, what
doesn't—and civics: "Through play
they acquire the social skills for making friends,
solving problems, giving voice to their ideas,"
says Bredekamp.
The index finger represents reading. But with preschoolers,
says Bredekamp, the story in the book is just the
beginning of what reading is about. "It's
the conversation that surrounds the book reading that
makes the difference: 'Why do you think that
happened? Why didn't Peter Rabbit's mother
want him to go into the garden? Have you ever done
anything naughty? What happened?' You need to
have a conversation about what's in the story,
what's between the lines in the story, and what's
beyond the story."
The ring finger is writing. Like reading, writing
is a broadly defined activity in a preschool setting:
it means a teacher writing a story or journal entry
to a child's dictation, it means helping a child
use words and pictures to tell a story, it means simply
teaching a child to write the letters in her name.
Finally, the little finger is helping children understand
the "code"—making the link between
sounds and letters. This, says Bredekamp, is one of
the later skills to come in.
Supporting all these activities, says Bredekamp,
there should be a rich curriculum supported by a wealth
of classroom materials for play and exploration. "There
has to be content. Kids learn about stuff, about the
world, from what's in the classroom and in the
curriculum."
Beyond the Five Fingers
Bredekamp's image of a hand reminds us what
needs to come first in creating a preschool program
that engages young children's minds and bodies:
language and play.
The hard part, says Bredekamp, is offering opportunities
for language and play activities that will build on
the cognitive and social skills each child brings
into the classroom—skills that will vary widely
from child to child, and even from day to day.
"The trick is to offer activities that are
achievable but challenging for each child, so children
can enhance their cognitive and social skills,"
says Bredekamp. Doing this, she suggests, requires
understanding the concept of developmentally appropriate
activities, which are sometimes misunderstood as activities
that are easy for children to do.
"Developmentally appropriate is an important
concept in early learning. A developmentally appropriate
expectation should be on the cutting edge of what
a child can accomplish—not too easy, but not
so difficult as to be frustrating," says Bredekamp.
"For instance you might expect a toddler to
pick up a book and turn the pages but you wouldn't
expect them to follow the print. You might expect
a four-year-old to differentiate between the print
and the picture, but not to decode words."
But even these expectations, says Bredekamp, need
to be tailored for individual children. "We
have learned that while there are typical sequences
of acquiring language or motor skills, not all children
follow them. Most babies start by cooing, then babbling,
then one-word sentences but some children don't
follow this sequence. Most children learn to crawl,
pull up, cruise and walk, but some babies never crawl."
So a good preschool program will be one that makes
room for different levels of achievement, physical
ability, and social savvy. It will also be one that
encourages the development of skills that have been
shown to predict later literacy.
"Young children who know a lot of words, that
know the alphabet, know that print has meaning and
that you go from left to right, from top to bottom—these
are all predictive of successful young readers,"
says Bredekamp.
Preschool is also a key time for building a strong
set of social and behavioral skills that will make
it easier for children to succeed academically as
they move on to elementary school.
"Being able to pay attention, to regulate emotions,
to persist at a task—these have a huge impact
on a child's academic success," Bredekamp
notes. "Kids who can't regulate their
own behaviors to conform to classroom expectations
have a lot harder time learning in school."
Don't Downplay Play
Bredekamp warns against underestimating the critical
importance of play in the preschool years. "If
you take away play, you take away the most important
way that kids have to develop the most important skills
they need in later years—the social and cognitive
skills they need to become readers and lifelong learners,"
says Bredekamp.
"Play is the foundation for children's
symbolic representation—the understanding that
one thing stands for another. Reading is based on
symbolic representation, so this aspect of play is
key for children becoming readers."
Play is also essential in helping kids flex their
social muscles. "It is through play that children
make friends, negotiate social problem solving, handle
a conflict. If you take away the opportunity for play
you take away the most important context for children
to learn to regulate their emotions appropriately,
develop language, develop social skills."
Bredekamp notes that children begin to engage in
social imaginative play as toddlers, and their capacity
and enjoyment of this kind of play peaks during the
preschool years, from 3 to 6. These are prime years
for children as dramatists, storytellers, creators.
The other key element of play is that it is directed
by children, not teachers. A good preschool teacher
will learn a lot by observing children at play, and
can put that knowledge to work to benefit individual
kids. "If we limit opportunities for children
to engage in self-directed play with each other we
lose the opportunity to see which kids are good players
or not. We lose the chance to help those kids who
need some extra help become better able to negotiate
their wants and needs with others, to manage their
frustrations and aggression," says Bredekamp.
Bredekamp worries that as formal testing becomes
more common in preschools, the preschool curriculum
will become too narrow and children will lose out
on time for integrating play and learning, as teachers
spend more time preparing these youngest learners
for short-answer tests. Head Start programs are now
required to administer formal assessment tests twice
each year to children as young as three.
Quality for All—a Tough Sell
Bredekamp believes that making quality preschool programs
accessible to low-income children is the key to any
serious effort to make sure all children enter kindergarten
ready to learn.
But, "There's little public will to make
sure quality child care and preschool programs are
available for low-income kids, even though there is
a wealth of research that quality programs can have
a positive impact on the cognitive and language development
of low-income kids," says Bredekamp.
By contrast, there really isn't much research
into the value of preschool for middle- and upper-income
children. Yet middle-class parents have shown that
they understand the importance of quality early learning
by seeking out good programs even when they are quite
expensive, says Bredekamp.
As a result, she says, a larger percentage of middle-income
children attend preschool than low-income children—a
reality that makes it even less likely that all children
will enter the kindergarten having achieved similar
levels of school readiness.
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