Emergent Writing: Why Children’s Play Choices Affect Learning

Emergent writing is dependent not only on a child’s exposure to literacy activities from birth, but how they engage with those activities on a day-to-day basis. This podcast discusses the four play ‘types’ that researchers have found fit the majority of children and what this means for their learning. You can listen to this episode above, listen to it on iTunes or Stitcher, or read the transcript below. Last week I had a request regarding emergent writing from Sue, who is an Early Years Advisor in Durham in the UK. So today we’re talking about how 2 and 3 year-olds choose to engage with writing materials, and what that tells us about them and their motivations for writing. This is a summary of a research paper by Deborah Wells Rowe and Carin Neitzel (the reference is below). What emergent writing activities do children choose? They were asking the question: What writing activities do very young children choose in preschool and why do they make these choices? The point, of course, is that if children choose to do specific types of writing activities often, and then ignore other activities this affects what they’re learning overall. And we might find that in a class of 15 children even though they’re exposed to the same writing materials and similar pre-writing activities their preferences, and how they choose to engage themselves in the literacy opportunities around them, means that in the end they might have very different experiences. 4 basic types of play Based on previous play research, the supposition is that children will often show a strong preference for one of four types of play: * they might be social * they might be creative * they might like to follow procedure * or they might be conceptual. What do our kids enjoy? As teachers we do our best to get to know what interests our individual children have, because we can then use that as a gateway to engage them in learning. The findings of this research are really an extension of that. It’s not just finding out whether Jane loves bugs and Davy loves to dance, it’s extending that further and finding that there are definite patterns of play that children will engage in over and over and over. Are we including activities all kids can enjoy? If we can see that our kids seem to fit into one of those four patterns of play, or perhaps show a preference for one over the other, we can make better decisions about how to engage them in writing activities, and be more aware of what to expect from them. We can’t expect the same outcomes from all children, no matter how much we are pushed from above regarding traditional areas of literacy. What motivates our kids? Children have different reasons for engaging with writing activities, and their goals are different, so unless they’re forced into producing some particular product, what we’ll see at the end will be very different, and that’s OK! Mostly, for 2 & 3 year olds literacy activities are interwoven into play opportunities that children might choose to do, or not do. That’s why looking at their play preferences is so important. What are our kids’ backgrounds? Of course, children are influenced by their families and cultural situations, they have unique histories and experiences which ...