5 Tips for Talking to Children at Play

As educators of young children, we are charged with weighty responsibilities, such as increasing students' vocabulary, facilitating purposeful play, and promoting social-emotional skills. Scary but true: What we say (and do not say) during play-based learning can make a big difference for our students. In our busy classrooms, it is easy to slip into communication patterns that are comfortable for us, but do not help our students grow and learn.

Here are a few tips for communicating with young learners at play:

1) Use words that students do not yet know.

The 2000 National Reading Panel demonstrated that children learn most words incidentally. Since our students spend many of their waking hours at school in play-based learning, early childhood educators have plenty of opportunities to strengthen students' vocabularies. Yet when we talk to young children, it can be tempting to stick to words that we think are easy for them to understand. We should fight this tendency: If we are not exposing our students to words beyond those they hear at home, they are not developing the vocabulary that will later prove useful to them as readers and writers.

We should use rich vocabulary as part of our everyday communication and instruction. It is never too soon to expose young learners to "big words."

Elevating our word choices can be as simple as choosing more sophisticated synonyms. Instead of saying, "Good job!," we can praise students with statements like "That is exceptional work!," "Excellent effort!," or "You persisted!" And rather than observing, "It’s cold today," we can talk about how "blustery" or "frigid" the weather is.

By casually using new words (and explaining them, when necessary) as students take part in engaging activities, we can help to build their vocabularies.

2) Ask good questions.

Play ought to be engaging for our young learners—but it is also an opportunity to promote higher-order thinking skills and independent learning. Then we ask close-ended questions (with one right answer in plain sight), we limit what our students can learn during play. Instead, our questions should encourage students to engage more deeply and reflect on their own learning.

When students are excited to tell us about the structures they have built, we can extend their thinking by asking, "What would happen if we moved this block?" or "How many blocks would we need to add, to make your structure taller than you? How did you know that?" Or, while one student is performing a task (such as sorting objects), we might ask another student, "Do you think she should put this piece in that cup? Why? Why not?"

Most of our questions throughout the day should be open-ended questions that give us more bang for the educational buck by pushing students' thinking. Even when we do ask a one-right-answer question, we can respond with, "That’s right! Tell me how you knew that!," rather than just confirming the student is correct.

3) Encourage problem solving.

It is easy to offer shortcut answers when difficulties arise. But what’s best for students ...

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