Intentional Teaching: Scaffolding Literacy Development Through Play

In early childhood education, play is the means by which children interact with and learn from the environment that surrounds them. Recent research indicates that children’s play-based literacy development is maximized with a teacher present, and potentially non-existent without the proper support. This caused us to conduct research in the pursuit of answering the question: How can we include opportunities for literacy development within a child’s play experiences? In order to conduct this research, we analyzed transcripts of video recordings from play experiences guided by a teacher as well as anecdotal notes taken from play experiences, teacher work samples/examples, and child work samples/artifacts. Our findings suggest that teachers play an important role in scaffolding children to expand their thought processes and make important connections to literacy. Analysis of the data highlights the importance of a teacher’s presence within early childhood classrooms in facilitating and guiding children’s play. These findings help justify intentional planning of play-based instruction to support literacy