Playing Their Way into Literacies: Reading, Writing, and Belonging in the Early Childhood Classroom

Karen Wohlwend provides a new framework for rethinking the boundaries between literacy and play, so that play itself is viewed as a literacy practice along with reading, writing, and design. Through a variety of theoretical lenses, the author presents a portrait of literacy play that connects three play groups: the girls and, importantly, boys, who played with Disney Princess media; Just Guys who used design and sports media to make a boys-only space; and a group of children who played teacher with big books and other school texts. These young children play by design, using play not only as a literacy to transform the texts that they read, write, and draw, but also as a tactic to transform their relational identities in the social spaces of peer and school cultures.

Emphasizing the importance of play despite current high-stakes testing demands, this book:

• Provides an argument for re-centering play in early childhood curricula where play functions as a literacy in its own right.
• Offers cutting-edge analyses and examples of new literacies, popular culture, and multimodal discourses.
• Illustrates how childrens play can both produce and challenge normative discourses regarding ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
• Examines the multimodal, multimedia textual practices of young children as they play across tensions among popular media, peer relationships, and school literacy.
• Features vivid descriptions, examples of young children in action, and photographs.