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June 13, 2013

PLAY:

It’s how children learn at the UCDC

babyIf “Play is a child’s work,” as child psychologist Jean Piaget once said, then the University Child Development Center (UCDC) is a premier job-training facility — and director Mary Beth McCulloch is making sure societal trends don’t get in the way of this training.

“So much of what children have exposure to is not conducive to helping them learn how to be socially responsible and good thinkers and able to make good decisions,” McCulloch says. “We’ve taken away a lot of their ability to play and be outside with their friends and navigate that social world on their own. There’s a trend for adults to make everything just so … If you don’t learn how to do things when you’re younger, you don’t have an opportunity to practice and learn those skills, and you’re not going to be very successful at that as an adult.”

The Oakland facility, a former church, has 165 children of Pitt staff members, faculty and students in 12 classrooms — four each for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. The kids range from six weeks to 5 years old, and “you can get on the waiting list unconceived,” McCulloch says — which may be a good idea, since the wait can be as long as three years. From 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., the kids get breakfast, a hot lunch and an afternoon snack along with lessons from UCDC’s 40 teachers. McCulloch started as a teacher at UCDC in 1992 and has been director of the center for the last five years.

blocksRecently, UCDC became a Keystone Stars 4 facility, the highest rating given to early-learning programs statewide by the commonwealth’s Office of Child Development and Early Learning, and awarded to only 15 percent of Allegheny County child facilities.

Their child-centered, play-based curriculum, says McCulloch, is one of the keys to UCDC’s success. “Play encompasses many areas of development, which is why it is critical,” she says. “The importance of it is about critical thinking, problem solving and giving kids a variety of experiences they feel some control over. It’s about materials, environment, relationships and understanding children’s ability to engage in different types of play,” from solitary play to side-by-side, or parallel, play and cooperative play.

McCulloch recalls the way play worked when she was younger: “We played outside all the time and nobody was there to save me. When I wrecked my bike, I got myself home. When the boys were throwing apples at me, I didn’t go home and tell my mom and she didn’t call all their parents.” Instead, she learned to deal with these social situations on her own, and developed useful skills for adulthood.

EaselParents of all eras want kids to know how to share, but sharing doesn’t necessarily come naturally to the youngest kids. Collaboration is a particularly salable job skill, McCulloch says, and lessons in cooperation need to start before school does.

So UCDC incorporates class activity that allows sharing and other child interactions to occur naturally. When the kids make their own play-dough in the pre-school classes for 3- and 4-year-olds, each child ends up with one color. “One of the kids will inevitably say, ‘Can I have some of your green play-dough?’” McCulloch reports. “And the other child at 3 is going to think — because they’re thinking — ‘Yes, but can I have some of your orange play-dough?’” The reward for sharing is teacher praise, likely coupled with a teacher suggestion to experiment and mix the colors, but the kids come to the decision to share or not to share on their own.

paintingMaking play-dough is a learning opportunity at UCDC. Not only do the kids help, pouring and stirring the flour and food coloring, but they get lessons in science, math and language, hearing new words like “incorporate,” “knead” and “mix.”

“While we place so much value on cognitive and physical development, at 3 and 4 they are exploring and trying out different roles and communication interactions,” McCulloch says. “It’s an expression of who they are. A lot of how children learn to understand who they are in their environment is by role-playing what they see and do and hear in their lives. So dramatic play is a very important piece of preschool play.”

Play also represents a child’s main academic learning opportunity. The nationwide school practice of teaching toward state tests of educational standards doesn’t help kids learn how to learn, McCulloch adds.

“When we talk about the skills we want children to learn,” she says, “making this happen in a natural and constructive way has value in the building.”

stethascopeAt the UCDC on a sunny day in May, 17 preschoolers in teacher Ammie Ribarchak’s classroom are playing nonstop. They’re playing in the tabletop sandbox; with the counting games on the lighted table, and with Buddha boards, which take water painted on their surface and turn it into colors beneath, looking like paint but avoiding the mess. They’re playing with rocks, seashells and pinecones from the natural materials collections; with math manipulatives for them to sort, count and classify, and in the dramatic play area, acting out social roles with dress-up clothes and doctor kits, plastic food and toy trucks, art materials and giant blocks.

None of these toys does anything by itself. Not one has batteries or makes a peep on its own. “You don’t need to buy fancy materials to have great play,” Ribarchak says.

At one table, associate teacher Jennifer Rodella sits with three boys who have made structures from a pile of small white boxes, plastic bottle caps and other odds and ends. Elliott has made a volcano, John has constructed a house where he says children live, and Dylan has made something he’s not talking about at all. (The names of the class’s children have been changed.)

Elliott’s volcano erupts.

Chalk drawing“Don’t touch it, it’s hot,” Rodella reminds Elliott. She turns to John, naming the materials he has used to build his structure. “How many of each do you have?” Next, she wonders aloud whether the villagers around Elliott’s volcano would have any use for part of the “soft toy” — a cotton ball — John’s “children” are enjoying.

John rips a piece from the cotton and passes it to Elliott. Without prompting, Elliott tears it in two to pass on to Dylan.

“I don’t want that,” Dylan says. Rodella doesn’t force the issue; she merely prompts him to say “No, thank you” instead.

Two more boys arrive. One of the boys eyes Dylan’s unnamed creation and asks three times: “When are you going to be done with that?” In answer, Dylan finally puts the materials behind his back.

“You can use it when Dylan is all done,” Rodella says to the newcomers.

John adds a plastic cap to his structure and announces, “Oh, it’s lighting up the whole world.”

“Can you see the clouds?” Rodella says. “Can you see the moon? Can you see the stars?” Without answering directly, it’s obvious John has absorbed the question’s meaning.

“My light is morning time,” he answers.

McCulloch later explains: “We try to instill good interaction between children in ways that are natural as opposed to forced and in ways that make sense, instead of in ways that say, ‘This is what you need to do because it’s good manners.’”

Plus, the science embodied in hot lava and bright lights become teachable moments, she says. “We take advantage of the progression of the play and facilitate new and different ideas or incorporate open-ended questions, posing things to help them think a little bit harder or a little bit more.”

In another area of the classroom, Michael is propelling a plastic lizard up the blouse of substitute teacher Erika Vaughn, who is as familiar to the kids as their regular teachers, since she subs only at UCDC.

“You know he likes to walk up walls,” Vaughn says. Michael ignores her and keeps the lizard moving. “I’m not a wall. What does he eat?” she says.

Just then, Michael notices Gary taking one of the small carpet samples that make up a pathway for a toy train. “No, that’s my street,” Michael says. Instead of protesting, Gary moves to retrieve more carpet pieces from their bin to help Michael improve his railroad.

Ribarchak observes: “That’s collaborative play. It started out as one child’s play scenario, but he did not object to another child taking part. In a 3-year-old classroom, that’s really the skills they are working on: Where are they going to fit in? Are they going to be a leader or a follower?”

Meanwhile, Ribarchak has been enlisted to hold and feed Gloria’s baby doll. Gloria wants to write a thank-you note. Ribarchak helps Gloria spell “Thank you.”

“Who is your note to?” Ribarchak asks. Gloria ignores the question, instead racing to a bin of drawing materials for an envelope. The envelope is too small for the paper.

“If it doesn’t fit, what do we need?” Ribarchak asks.

“A bigger one,” Gloria says. She races for a new envelope. The paper is still too big.

“You know what you could do?” Ribarchak says. “You could fold your note in half.”

Gloria’s folding accomplished, Ribarchak repeats: “Who is your note to?” But Gloria has her own agenda: “I need some tape.”

Later, Ribarchak explains: “That’s a little girl who knows how to write her letters but not her words. She wanted me to write it but I told her, ‘Why don’t you write it?’ We try very hard to take their prior knowledge and build on it.”

In the middle of all this, Billy races over with another boy in tow. Billy is wearing a bright yellow construction vest. “Do you know what we are?” he says. “Ghostbusters!” The word has a few extra syllables and a stray consonant or two but is unmistakable in its enthusiastic delivery.

He runs back to another associate teacher, Cheryl Petro.

“We did it!” the other boy announces.

“No, we didn’t,” says Billy. “It got away.”

sandboxNext to the pair, April serves food items one at a time on a dish, naming each plastic delicacy, while Jonathan presents and labels every construction truck in the room. When cleanup time is announced, April drags out a basket of jewel-colored square magnetic blocks. Advised to put it away, April lifts one basket handle half an inch and looks up imploringly. “It’s heavy,” she says. She easily gets someone to help.

“Part of learning is by sharing the knowledge that they may have,” Ribarchak elucidates later, “to be able to express their knowledge and have it validated.

“We encourage teamwork,” she adds. “So if there’s something you can’t do, grab a friend. Even if they don’t need help, they will grab someone and proudly announce that they did something as a team.”

UCDC currently is preparing for reaccreditation by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. Ernie Dettore is play content expert for the Pittsburgh chapter of that organization. He also teaches the Theory and Meaning of Play course as an adjunct instructor in the School of Education’s applied developmental psychology program, and has trained UCDC staff. He believes UCDC is one of a half-dozen premier early-learning centers in Pittsburgh.

“They have a wonderful philosophy of play: child-centered, teacher-guided … and what a great diversity of cultures they have there,” he says. “There are a lot of opportunities for cognitive literacy skills. The children are very engaged in their learning, so in a lot of ways they are getting to become independent and to become divergent thinkers, to both verbalize and put their thoughts in action.”

Divergent thinking is the idea that teachers will ask open-ended questions, such as why and how, so they can gain more understanding of what the kids want to know and what they are thinking. The opposite is convergent thinking: Asking every child what is the color of Sally’s shirt on page 13 of the book they all are reading together.

In child centers focused on old-style convergent thinking, kids don’t develop their own opportunities to learn, Dettore says. At UCDC, “The teachers are making the kids think beyond the context of the literal answer.”

UCDC education coordinator Jamie Wincovitch agrees: “We’re constantly showing them the power of language but also how to be curious and find out about things.” If a child asks, “Should we go out today?” a teacher will reply, “I don’t know. Let’s take a look outside.” Walks may involve less walking than stopping at a bird’s nest to discuss its origins, construction and use; a street repair site may prompt discussions of machinery or even a conversation with the workers.

If a child enters UCDC from a more structured play environment, or an academic program that involves worksheets and such traditional classroom tools, the change is dramatic. “It’s a completely different world here,” Wincovitch says. “Each child has their own goal. Children develop at very, very different rates. Our goal is to make the child successful, however that is for the specific child.

“The teacher’s job,” she concludes, “is to create an environment that begs the children to play.”

—Marty Levine


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