You set a high standard when you asked for a “great example!” I attempted to write one, but found that I needed four or five pages to do it justice, and still was not satisfied with it. Maybe you can take a look at some of the examples in the book “Increasing the Power of Instruction.” You might look at one of my favorites on pp. 86 and 87.

I wonder if this particular child is feeling insecure, and to him the 'bad guy' represents a person with power....not only the power but also the security that 'power' brings. Here are two NAEYC articles that discuss this issue, which most certainly is one found in many, many preschool classrooms.

http://www.naeyc.org/files/tyc/file/Superhero%20and%20Gun%20Play%20Resou...

http://www.naeyc.org/files/tyc/file/Levin_1.pdf

I think it is the role of education to broaden interests and to encourage the development of interests that are productive for learning the kinds of things that will be valuable to children. It sounds to me like the boy you described first (interest in bad guys or shooting) needs intervention from someone with more skill in social behavior and emotional problems than most preschool teachers have. I would suggest that you look into making a referral to experts who might be able to help the child move beyond the confines of his very narrow interest in good and bad guys, and guns, and get to the bottom of his shyness and refusal to talk at the beginning of the year.

First of all, the kindergarten “writing” task you describe is very narrow in the learning it supports. Most important of all, the children create no message. They just copy a teacher’s “pat” message and fill in a few words to make it “their own.” That’s handwriting only. Writing in a broad sense involves (1) message creation, (2) word creation (i.e., children thinking about how they could write the words for a message they create—kindergartners will create many non-standard spellings), and
(3) handwriting.

In the task you describe, the teacher also might think that children learn that print is accessed from left to right and from top to bottom on a page. But even for that learning, the slow process involved in finding your place, copying a word, and then finding your place again would hinder children in developing the visual sweeping motion from left to right needed for reading. Learning that print goes from left to right, and learning to track print in this direction, is supported when a teacher underlines titles of books or poems each day and tracks print as he or she reads longer messages that have been written on chart paper.

If the teacher’s goal is to support the development of children’s handwriting skill, there are many meaningful ways to provide this support, including having children write about something of interest. For example, asking children to write messages to accompany pictures they draw about a weekend experience would support their handwriting skill development, as well as their composing and word creation skill. A teacher would, of course, need to circulate among the children to provide support.

Many children have difficult tracking when copying something written on the board, and many children also easily lose track of where they are on their own paper. I would need to see your child in action, to know whether she is having more difficulty than is typical. Having said that, I see very little, if any, pedagogical value in the task. If, for some reason, your child’s teacher is adamant about having children learn to copy a message (although I can’t think of any sound pedagogical reason why), it would be much better if the message were provided in individual copy form to each child. This would at least simplify the visual/spatial part of the task. I also want to mention the possibility that a child who has more difficulty in copying from the board than is typical for kindergartners (many kindergartners find the task challenging) might have a vision problem that adds to the difficulty. It would be a good idea to have your child’s vision checked, just to rule out any problem there.

Your daughter is lucky to have an understanding mother to support her. Unfortunately, there will be times during a child’s school years when the instruction in a classroom is not as we would wish. Then, as parents, we must provide support, both physically and emotionally, while also supporting our school and its teachers. Your sticky notes idea is great! The very fact that you’ve listened to your daughter and have thought of a way to help support her in accomplishing the task models problem solving.

Your experience reminds me of some with our son when he was around your daughter’s age and a few years older. He would become frustrated with some task (e.g., homework) and would want to give up. I’d sit down and say, “Okay, let’s just think about this.” I would help him organize the task and get started. Many years later, when he was a freshman in college, he was very concerned about an up-coming chemistry test. When he called after the exam, he said it was the hardest he’d ever taken and that he’d considered walking out and changing his major. Other students were in fact getting up and leaving. Then, he said, “But I remembered when I was a little kid and would get frustrated and think I couldn’t do something, you’d say ‘let’s just think about this’. And then we would think about it and I could do it. So I said to myself “calm down and just think about these questions.’ I did that, and they didn’t seem as hard. I think I did okay.” (He’s now a first year resident in pediatrics.) I think that, despite this tough time for your daughter, you will see her through it and she will draw lessons from it that will serve her well in the future. Best of luck!

I am a young 5's teacher who has a writing workshop each day in my class. I believe that copying things from the board is not developmentally appropriate practice at all. Children need to be free to chose their own writing topics, draw a picture to go with it and to attempt to write down some sounds they hear in words. When they do this they are learning letter sounds, the letters themselves, gaining fine motor control, etc. A topic sentence and supporting ideas is asking too much of five year olds. Wow!

The challenge you describe is one faced by many teachers in all parts of the country. The best language program is one provided by teachers in their everyday interactions with children. Of course, children do need rich content if they are to have something to talk about and a context within which to develop a good vocabulary. I do think an organized curriculum is essential to making sure that children’s knowledge and language skill can truly build over time, and research supports this view.

There are many experts in early childhood language (e.g., Catherine Snow, Patton Tabors, Roberta Golinkoff, Kathy Hirsh-Pacek, Isabelle Beck, and many, many others). Many language experts do not write instructional programs for children. Those who do, and are listed as authors on published curricula, often have relatively little “influence” on the product. Publishers typically have their own in-house writers. They use “experts” to provide advice that publishers can elect to use or disregard. Keep in mind that, in this country, unlike in many countries around the world, school materials are a commercial enterprise. Companies that develop programs and instructional materials must sell their products to very diverse groups of teachers/schools all across the country. They try to meet needs as best they can. Often, however, products fall short in providing the level or kind of support that is needed in a specific site. Teachers must adjust, adapt, add to, and subtract from a program to make it meet their needs. If you are in a situation that requires you to adopt a commercial program, do your best to find one that meets your needs, and then know that your work has only just begun. In other words, you will still likely need to adjust, adapt, add to and subtract from whatever you adopt, to make it work well for you. Even a pretty good program is only as good as good teachers make it!

In an ideal world, teachers and educational leaders in specific school sites would be able to develop their own program, drawing on experts of various kinds who live in their area and also using various resources from organizations, such as The National Association for the Education of Young Children and The International Reading Association. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop one’s own curriculum, which is perhaps why many teachers and administrators look for help from commercially available resources.

You bring up a very important assessment issue: Receptive language is often all that is measured in programs, while expressive language is not measured. And you are also correct in noting that programs and teachers often focus narrowly on only what is assessed. Actually, only receptive vocabulary is measured, in many cases, not receptive language abilities that go beyond vocabulary. Both receptive and expressive vocabulary measures are “simple vocabulary,” which means that children’s understanding of words, beyond knowledge of mere labels for items and actions, is not assessed. For good reading comprehension, children need vocabulary understanding at a deeper level. For example, a child who can point to a leaf of a plant might have little knowledge of what leaves do, and might not know names or functions of other plant parts, such as roots, stems, trunks, and buds. Science learning from books that children will try to read later will suffer from both limited and superficial vocabulary knowledge, as will children’s understanding of literary uses of terms, such as in the comment, “Her roots in the community are deep.”

Regarding “word calling” when reading (i.e., decoding individual words, but not comprehending the meaning of series of words in sentences or larger portions of text), the absence of well-developed language and content knowledge is not the only cause. The kinds of books read to young children matter, as does how the books are read. For example, if only predictable text books are read, children’s language development will likely be more limited than if children hear narratives (i.e., real stories—setting, characters, problem, plot). But even if children hear narratives, they will not learn to think about what they read, in ways that are important for comprehension of big ideas, if their teachers stop after reading every page to ask literal question (e.g., for the story Corduroy, “What color are Corduroy’s overalls?” “Where in the department store did Corduroy live?”).

I am genuinely worried by much of what I see in preschools during read-a-loud time. Predictable text books are used rather heavily. Teachers seem to think that chiming-in participation by the children is just great. Of course, we should read some predictable text books, some of the time. Children do love such books, memorize them quickly, and “read” them in the library area. Doing so makes them feel like readers. But good narratives provide much better opportunities for language development. And, most importantly, experiences with narratives are necessary for the development of thinking of the kind that is important for later reading comprehension. Little details should not be focused on in teachers’ comments and questions. Comments and questions that support inferential thinking should be the focus, because this is the kind of thinking that matters for both listening and reading comprehension. Preschoolers also benefit from the appropriate use of good informational books.

How can you be most successful? You can provide a program that is rich in real experiences and a daily schedule that includes a variety of different experiences (e.g., story time, circle time, center time, outdoor time, and a small groups time). You can talk to children in all situations, even when doing routine tasks, such as when helping a child put on his or her boots, or remove a painting from the easel. (I often see teachers do these things while remaining silent.) Don’t worry as much about what children are not yet saying, as you worry about what you and other teachers are saying. Children will learn a lot of language by hearing a lot of good language. (Sometimes, I think that too much is made of “getting children to talk” and too little is made of the amount and quality of input they hear from us.) Wipe out any tendency to use “Good job!” and “Wow” (empty talk, I call it), and simple, “uh-huh” responses to children’s comments and questions. When children respond with one word, respond with an expansion, both linguistically and in terms of content. For example, if a child approaches you during center time and says, “paint,” and you think the child is telling you that he or she wants to paint, you might say: “Are you telling me that you would like to paint now? Yes? Okay, the easel is ready. A smock for you to wear is right here on the hook. That’s right. The big hole in the smock goes over your head.... ..and then your arms go through the smaller holes on the side. Okay. You are all ready to paint.”

Lastly, don’t let yourself think that you have little influence, just because children’s parents’ language is limited in some ways. Your influence at school will be enormous, as long as you provide rich programming, use solid instructional strategies in everything you do, and make sure that your own talk is rich and informative. We need to use quality talk, day in and day out, all day long, week after week, and month after month. Based on your question, I know that you understand this. Try not to become discouraged. You can make more of a difference than you might think. I wish you the best. Thanks so much for your important question.

Thanks for your question. I’d be happy to provide several examples.

Example #1: Let’s suppose that it’s story time and a teacher has just held up the storybook for the day and read its title, while underlining the words. For the sake of our example, let’s suppose that the storybook is Corduroy. So far, so good. At this point, let’s suppose the teacher then asks, “Who sees a letter C in the word Corduroy?” A child raises her hand and is called on to come up to point to the letter C. “Good job!” the teacher tells the child as she returns to her spot on the floor. Then, the teacher asks, “Who sees a letter D in the word Corduroy?” Another child is called on to come point it out. “Yes,” the teacher says, “and this time, the letter is in the middle of the word, not at the beginning.” After this child returns to his seat, the teacher asks, “Who can come up and point to the last letter in the word, Corduroy, and tell us the letter’s name?” A few hands are raised. The teacher calls on a child to do this. After this child returns to her seat, the teacher says, “Okay, let’s read our story.”

The teacher has a list of “key” vocabulary words to support with verbal explanations during the reading. “Shoppers” is on the list, as are the words “shoulder” and “sighed.” After the teacher finished reading the second page, which says that the “store was always filled with shoppers…” although no one was interested in buying a little teddy bear in green overalls, the teacher asked, “Who can tell us what ‘shoppers’ means?” The teacher called on three children who took a stab at it (e.g., “peoples in the store”; “when you buy stuff,”; “it’s when you go and you, uh, uh, when you give the money… and the toy is, uh, uh.. .you get the toy”). The teacher then read the next page, stopping after the line when Lisa’s mother says she’s “spent too much already,” to ask, “Who can tell us what ‘sighed’ means?” (The teacher did not read the mother’s dialogue in a sighing voice.) A few children attempted to explain the word. The teacher finished reading the last two lines on the page, and then asked, “Who can tell us what a ‘shoulder’ is?” This pattern of “reading” the story continued throughout.

After the story reading, the teacher said, “Okay, now let’s review our vocabulary words. Say ‘shoppers’ with me.” (The children did.) “And we remember that ‘shoppers’ are the people who buy things in a store.” The teacher continued similarly, to review eight key vocabulary words.

On the one hand, we can say that the teacher supported the development of alphabet and print skills, when dealing with the book’s title, and that the teacher supported vocabulary development, both during the reading and after. On the other hand, anyone who knows what’s important in reading would be absolutely alarmed by the choices this teacher made, in this context. It’s probably safe to say that proceeding in this way, with this story and all others, would completely undermine the development of a child’s comprehension. Children learn to interact with and think about text. If teachers focus on things that are tangential to meaning, or approach the meaning related items, such as the meanings of words, in a way that creates long breaks in the story and completely displaces any attention to the story’s meaning, they are not helping children learn what to focus on and think about in a story content, nor are they modeling higher level, inferential thinking, with comments of our own.

I have seen this situation, which is very, very harmful to children’s long term reading development, in many preschool classrooms, with the teacher and supervisors both thinking that the teacher is doing a very good job. This position is only possible to defend, if staff are poorly informed about comprehension and what is required to support it.

Example #2: Let’s suppose that a child at the writing center, who has drawn a picture, calls to a teacher to come take a look. The teacher joins the child at the writing table, points to one part of the picture and says, “Tell me about this.” The child labels the item “my house.” “Okay,” says the teacher, “I’ll write that down.” The teacher writes the words beside the picture and says, “That says, ‘my house.’ Okay, now tell me about this part?” (points to another part of the drawing). The child says, “That’s flowers me and Mommy planted in the grass.” The teacher says, “Okay, I’ll write that down.” She writes, “That’s flowers me and Mommy planted in the grass,” and then reads the print quickly, after writing it: “That says, ‘“That’s flowers me and Mommy planted in the grass.’ ” The teacher continues in this way until each major portion of the child’s drawing has been labeled by the child and written down by the teacher.

At best, the teacher showed the child the low level understanding that speech can be written down. (I have described this understanding as “low level” because most preschoolers already have this understanding.) The teacher did not, however, take advantage of this opportunity to extend the child’s language. For example, had the teacher just conversed with the child for a while about her picture, instead of rushing to write down specific labels, she might have found out, as I did after the teacher left, that the flower plants, purchased at the grocery store, had been kept inside for a while until it was warm enough to plant them outside; that the child helped water the plants, using a watering can; and that the child had cut a few flowers recently, with the help of her mother, to take to her grandmother.

This was a wonderful language opportunity, because neither the teacher nor I had observed first hand the event portrayed in the picture. For the child, then, this situation was a decontextualized language situation (i.e., a situation in which talk is not about the “here and now”). Experience in talking about these situations is especially important for future reading comprehension and immediate listening comprehension, because a child must use language to tell someone else about something that is not right before either one of them.

To get “the whole story” of the child’s drawing, I probed a bit with questions, such as, “Did you plant seeds in the ground to grow your flowers?” The child said, “No, we boughted them at the grocery store.” I could recast the irregular verb (i.e., “Oh, you bought them at the grocery store. I’ve seen plants at grocery stores too.”), which is helpful for grammatical development. Then, I added, “And you brought them home and planted them?” The child said, “No. We waited because, uh, they could a gotted freezed.” I had a chance to recast here too, and added, “Oh, it wasn’t quite spring time yet, when you and your Mom bought the plants? I buy my plants early too, and keep them in my house for a while, because it’s too cold outside in the ground. You are right that they would freeze and die.”

After talking with the child and getting “the whole story,” I told the child I could write down what she had told me on another piece of paper, if she would like. She wanted me to do that. First, I summarized verbally what she had told me and asked if this was what she wanted the writing to say about her drawing. She said that it was. I then wrote down four or five sentences to capture all of the meanings that the child had conveyed to me, using my own mature grammar and sentence structures. I moved from the right side of the paper, back to the left side, two times, as I wrote the message, because the message was too long to fit all on one line. I read the whole message back to the child, after I had finished writing it, underlining the print from left to right, and, of course, moving back from the right side of the paper to the left, as I finished reading one line and then began reading the next one.

Of course, I had more time than the teacher to sit and talk with the child, but I think the main difference between our two approaches was not determined by the amount of time we had available. The difference was in our views about what is important learning to support in a child in this situation. By focusing on print—writing labels for each item in the picture—the teacher provided little if any support for the child’s language development and very little support for print skills. By focusing first on a conversation with the child, I provided multiple levels of support for language development, and for knowledge development, as well. My writing of the message modeled as much, if not more, about print than did the teacher’s quick writing of short labels. Had I had less time, I would simply have engaged in the conversation with the child and would have written nothing. That’s how important the language and content knowledge are to me, compared to superficial print skills, which I can support in other contexts that do not provide the other opportunities for learning that this situation offers.

Example #3: A child at the writing center wanted to write the word “kitten” to go with a picture of a kitten she has drawn. The child called to the teacher for help (i.e., “I don’t know how to make the word kitten”). The teacher joined the child at the writing center, wrote the word, kitten, on a piece of paper, and then sat beside the child as the child copied the word onto her picture paper. The teacher used her finger to point to each letter that the child needed to write next, and named it. The teacher was at the writing table for about four minutes to provide this assistance.

The teacher undermined one area of learning, while supporting other areas, when she could have supported all. The teacher’s approach suggested to a child that word creation in an alphabetic writing system is a matter of learning the letter sequences for each and every word. In reality, our writing system is code based. The power of a code-based system is that a basic understanding of how it works can then provide a foundation for the writing of many words, without our having to memorize their letter sequences.

When I find myself in similar situations, I approach them quite differently. I say, “Okay. Let’s see…. kitten…I hear /k/ at the very beginning of that word, and we use the letter K to write that sound.” I might isolate the second phoneme in the spoken word after the child had finished writing the letter “K,” depending on the child’s attention and level of phonological awareness. Or, I might just say, “Now, there’s an ‘I’ next in the word kitten.” Then, I would isolate the /t/ in the middle of the word and tell the child that we use the letter T to write that sound, and that this word has two T’s in its middle. Then, I would tell the child there is an ‘E” next, and then I would say the word, “kitten” again, holding onto the /n/ sound at the end. I would tell the child that we use the letter N to write the /n/ sound. I would use a letter chart as a reference for the child, if the child indicated that she didn’t know a letter, and I might model its formation, if the child asked me to (i.e., I can’t make that one.” Or “I don’t know K”).

In summary, I would provide help to the child in a way that does not mislead her into thinking that our writing system works in one way, when, in fact, it works in quite another. In the approach I used, the child’s phonemic awareness would be supported, and some specific sound-letter connections and the left to right progression of organizing print on a writing surface, would also be modeled. Letters would also be named.

In the very near future, would I expect the child to be able to write, “kitten” or any other word, by isolating its sounds and linking letters to them? Of course not. But this does not mean that we should withhold good and accurate models that demonstrate “how print actually works” when we have opportunities such as these in which to provide them. I would not restrict the language I speak to a six-month-old baby to coos and babble, or even to just one-word utterances, just because this is all the baby can do right now, nor would I expect my full sentences to have an immediate effect on the baby’s productive speech. But if we restrict what we model to babies and preschoolers to what they can do at the moment, they will not learn very much.

I hope these examples clarify what I mean by “undermining learning in another domain.” As you can see, we also undermine learning in the same domain, if we aren’t careful. I’d be interested in knowing whether you think you have seen such phenomena in your own experience, now that you know what I mean. I’d be astonished if you haven’t, because I see examples in almost every preschool classroom I visit. I also must admit that I probably engaged in a fair amount of “undermining” instructional behavior of my own, many years ago, when I didn’t understand quite as much as I understand now.

I’ve been struggling with your question for several days, because I thought I’d write a good example. I have not been able to create an example with which I’m happy, in the time I’ve had this week. (This is why it took me about three years to write, “Increasing the Power of Instruction.”) Let me refer you to pages 86 and 87 in the book. On those pages, you will find an example of two girls who were building with blocks. The example includes learning in the (1) social sciences (e.g., the invention of doors as entryways, the use of street signs for streets, the idea of mail delivery, awareness of resources typically available in a neighborhood, the relationship between buyers and sellers, and so on); (2) mathematics (measurement and the use of three-dimensional objects—blocks); (3) literacy (e.g., street signs, captions for photos taken to document the block buildings); (4) physics (getting blocks to balance when building); (5) the qualities of various materials (masking tape is sticky, markers contain ink that is absorbed into paper); and (6) social skills development (e.g., children working together on a variety of activities). I hope this little synopsis helps!

Thanks for this interesting question! I think about the “architecture” of a curriculum –the range of instructional contexts it provides (e.g., circle time, small groups, story time)—and then about where a specific experience would work best. In terms of knowledge/concept development, or the development of skill, such as in phonological awareness or counting, I think about clusters of related experiences that would support the learning and about a reasonable sequence in which to provide these experiences. For me, it’s not so much a matter of which concepts do or do not belong in which instructional contexts, but a matter of which kinds of experience and which phases of children’s learning are supported best in each instructional context. One example provided in "Increasing the Power of Instruction" involves the use of the book, "The Doorbell Rang" (Hutchins, 1986). The suggestion is for the teacher to read the book first in Circle Time. From this experience, preschoolers get the basic ideas that Sam and Victoria (the main characters) shared their cookies, and that the number of cookies available for each child decreased as more and more children arrived for a visit. The book does not, however, include the actual events that involve dividing the cookies. It provides only the results (e.g., “That’s two each..”).

It is suggested (see chapter 6) that the teacher use a small group setting to follow up the first reading of the book that is provided in Circle Time. Flannel cookies are used to demonstrate the cookie division, and children in the small group are engaged in thinking about how Sam and Victoria divided the cookies each time new children arrived. This activity could take from 10 to 15 minutes to “work out” with the small group of children, and the teacher provides specific feedback and scaffolding, depending on children’s actions and understandings.

A teacher would not be able to engage enough individual children or to provide specific feedback to individual children, if this follow-up activity were done in Circle Time. (Or, if a teacher tried to provide it, many children in the group would likely disengage when the teacher was not dealing directly with them.) Moreover, an activity this long would limit the number of activities provided during a Circle Time. Without a range of activities during Circle Time, and fairly quick movement from one activity to the next, it is difficult to keep a whole group of diverse children engaged. And, of course, engagement and enjoyment are essential for any kind of learning.

It’s interesting to think about learning sequences in terms of those least understood. I think the hardest sequences to understand are those in which, to the adult’s eye, the child goes backward, not forward, or exhibits behavior that the adult has never modeled. I’ll provide a few examples of what I mean.

Example 1: When young children are learning how words are created (i.e., why a specific letter sequence is used to spell a word), we typically see first just letter strings that look like words. The child uses about 5 or 6 letters (the average length of words seen in the environment), uses a variety of letters (three-year-olds know that HHHHH cannot be a word, because, “you can’t have them all the same”), does not place more than two letters of the same kind in succession, and so on. Children ask adults, “What word is this?” thinking that each letter string is indeed a word. Of course, very few of a child’s letter strings are actual words, because children have no idea, at this point, that letters used to spell each word match the sounds (more or less) in the spoken word counterpart. During the time when children are creating “words” using a letter string strategy, they are also typically interested in their names and begin to use whatever marks they can form to write them. They line these up (usually) and the marks bear some resemblance to the actual letters in their name. Meanwhile, children are gradually beginning to realize that there’s a relationship between the sounds in a spoken word and the symbols used to write the word, but they can at first only detect syllable segments in spoken words. They cannot yet detect sounds at the phoneme level. At this point, when creating words, they begin to use one mark for each syllable they say (e.g., “I Love You, Mommy,” might be written with the letters AADDA, formed in very rudimentary fashion). Notice the complete lack of a match between the sounds these particular letters represent and any sounds in the message the child has written. But when we know that the child’s name was ADAM, we realize that he just used the letters from his name to write his “I Love You, Mommy” message. He is detecting a beginning level of sound in spoken words, but he has no idea of any relationships between sounds in spoken words and the sounds assigned to specific letters. Then, a few days later, let’s suppose that Adam wrote his own name, using just two letters, an A and a D, even though, for many weeks previously, he had used four rudimentary characters that he named “A” “D” “A” and “M.” When asked to “tell about the two letters he had written,” he said, “That’s my name, A-DAM,” breaking the name exactly into its two syllables.

Parents and teachers have difficulty accepting this kind of child behavior, because they think the child is losing ground. I’ve heard both parents and teachers say to a child who has behaved in this way, “Oh, you can write your name better than that!” They did not realize that the child had made a tremendous leap forward in his/her conceptual understanding about the relationship between printed words and their spoken counterparts. A child who behaves in this way cannot yet detect sounds at the phoneme level, which is the level (more or less) at which spoken words are coded in alphabetic writing systems. Nevertheless, the child has made a very important first step toward beginning to understand how a sound-based writing system works.

There are many other examples of this kind. All have in common the child’s movement forward conceptually, while seeming to disregard some “surface” features.

Example 2: A child who counts, “20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, twenty-ten” is behaving conceptually. Given that some of the decade names in English (e.g., twenty, thirty, fifty…) are hard to remember because they do not match the sound structure of their single digit counterparts (e.g., two, three, five), children sometimes create a rule-based name and use it for a while to fill in these slots. In this case, adults might have counted with a child many times using the term “30.” But, then, when counting on his/own, the child uses “twenty-ten” not “thirty.” From a conceptual point of view, the child is right on target (e.g., thirty is 20 and 10 more). Interestingly, first grade teachers in this country spend considerable time trying to get children to understand the base ten organization of our number system, after having treated it as having a “one more” structure from 1 to 100, when teaching children to count, and having viewed “twenty-ten” as incorrect/wrong. Of course, on the surface, it is wrong, because we use the word “thirty.” Conceptually, though, the terminology is not wrong, and our response to such an error should not be the same as a response to a child who calls a spoon “a fork.”

Example 3: Children’s learning of vocabulary also follows an interesting sequence. A colleague shared with me the example of a preschool child who had learned about transparent, translucent, and opaque objects during explorations of objects to make shadows. A week or so later, she was looking at a book about birds and saw on one page a bird in a bird cage. She shouted to her teacher, ”Hey, a bird cage is transparent!” The teacher explained, “Yes, we can see through the spaces in between the wire rods of the bird cage, but we use the word transparent only when we can see through something concrete—some material substance. If something is open, we don’t use that word." Children typically, at first, both over- and underextend words, because they have not yet learned the limits of each word’s meaning. For many words, learning these limits takes years.

Young children are truly remarkable thinkers and learners. We can only appreciate this when we look beneath their surface behavior and try to figure out the “why” for what they say and do. Thinking about your question has reminded me of just how important it is for early educators to have a deep understanding of child development. I was also reminded of how much there is for us to learn about children.

Thank you for your question. You are correct that deep learning of the kind suggested in “Increasing the Power of Instruction” is often undercut when instruction is limited to the specific knowledge and skills probed by state tests and is provided mostly in isolation. This problem is obvious in the area of reading. In the early phases of learning to read, children absolutely must have alphabet, phonological, and other print-related skills, because learning to read depends on knowing how to decode words. Unfortunately, so much effort is often placed on the learning of these skills that few opportunities are provided for children to acquire content learning (e.g., science, social science). In early years reading instruction, there is also often too little support for comprehension and language development. Materials for beginner readers are designed to have very simple language and content, because this eases the task of recognizing words. But by third grade, and then with every grade thereafter, reading materials increase in difficulty. We then begin to see a slide in reading achievement in many children, because, suddenly, they need much more than decoding skill, and their early grade teachers did not have time, or did not take the time, to provide science and social science experiences, to read higher- level stories, and to engage in discussion and conversation with children around important ideas. Unfortunately, there is no quick fix for the absence of content knowledge, language skill, or skill in inferential thinking when these are lacking in third or fourth graders. Knowledge and skill in these areas build slowly over time. If a child loses four or five years of support for learning in these areas, it is incredibly difficult to close the gap.

Sometimes, I think about the area of medicine and the established habit and discipline in that field of considering “side effects” or “risks.” Physicians constantly balance the benefits of some treatment or procedure with its known side effects or risks, in both the short and long term. We need to adopt this stance in education, especially the stance of looking not only at the short term, but also at the long term. Good resources to help in addressing this issue, perhaps with colleagues and administrators, include articles by Teale et al. and Dickinson et al., in the May 2010 issue of “Educational Researcher;” the chapter by Juel in the Handbook of Early Literacy Research, Vol 2 (2006); the chapter by Paratore, et al. in the Handbook of Reading Research, Vol. 4 (2011); and the chapter by Juel in the book Bringing Reading Research to Life (McKeown & Kucan, Eds., 2010).

Your question reminded me of an experience a few years ago in my early literacy doctoral seminar. One of the students had been a fifth grade teacher and a resource room teacher for upper elementary children. Because it was unusual for students in this seminar to come from middle grades backgrounds, I asked why this student had decided to enroll in the seminar. The student explained, “I want to learn more about early literacy because I spend a great deal of my time dealing with poor comprehension in upper grade students, and I think many of the problems could have been prevented with good programs and instruction in the early grades." In subsequent classes, we sometimes discussed how the concerns of first- and second-grade teachers seem to influence what kindergarten and preschool teachers include in their literacy programming, with the result, very often, that instruction in these early years classrooms is narrowed. This student recommended that administrators arrange meetings between preschool and kindergarten teachers, and middle grades teachers, because middle grades are the ones, in this student’s view, who would support more content related experiences in the early years, as well as more focus on thinking and problem-solving. I had never thought about doing that!

This question is difficult to answer because what might make the most sense for the children or families might not make the most sense for the teachers or school administrators. Locating all preschool classrooms in one building has advantages for the preschool teachers, because they have colleagues close by with similar interests and challenges, and because they can share resources and support one another in various ways. For example, appropriate outdoor playgrounds for very young children often cannot be replicated in four or five sites in a district. On the other hand, locating preschool classrooms in one building separates this level of schooling from the kindergarten and primary grades, which makes it harder to develop understanding of programming across these various levels. I think the consequences of decisions for families should receive the most consideration. For example, if a family has three children and each is in a different school location in the district, the situation can become very overwhelming, especially if the district is large and without public transportation. For this reason, I would prefer locating preschool classrooms in neighborhood schools, if possible. It is wonderful to hear that a district is thinking about expanding its preschool offerings in these tough economic times. Good luck!

Thank you for your question. Yes, I think this model of instruction meets the needs of many individual learners with various disabilities. All learners need rich and varied experiences. Sometimes, we limit what is offered to children with various disabilities, thinking that they can’t benefit, or that we can’t spare the time, given specific activities that have been prescribed for some individual children. We cheat children when we limit their access to the kind of rich programming suggested in “Increasing the Power of Instruction.” Of course, teachers must adapt and adjust their specific approaches, including the scaffolding they provide to individual learners. The basic ideas about what constitutes solid and rich learning, however, remain the same for all learners.

I do hope you have a chance to read more of the book. I know many teachers in inclusion classrooms that use this model of instruction. In fact, many wonderful teachers and children, from a wide variety of classrooms, inspired virtually all of the examples you will find in the book. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of them for helping me learn about children, and about teaching and learning, and for the inspiration they have provided over the years. There’s nothing quite so wonderful to watch as a terrific teacher in action. And there’s nothing I find more interesting than watching toddlers and preschoolers in the act of learning. When done well, teaching is truly a work of art. I never really feel that I’ve managed to capture the wonderful teaching I’ve seen on the pages of any book, although I try