The Power of Fantasy in Early Learning

Jenny Tyrrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134552122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The Power of Fantasy in Early Learning is a truly unique book, based around the case study of a class of children, their teacher and a stuffed bear suit. Jenny Tyrrell illustrates the possibilities that an inanimate object can offer the teaching and learning situation. Drawing on her extensive experiences, she shows how the bear became an integral part of the school. Theory and practice are combined to explore teaching issues in the early years including the influence of the bear on the whole school, imaginative development, motivation to read and write and the influence of learning goals in a child's school life in the early years.
This is a truly original work which will give heart to teachers everywhere and provide plenty of fresh insight into the debate on the nature of learning.

Chapter 1
‘Or in the heart or in the head’

It was the end of August and I was contemplating the needs of the class I was about to begin working with for a year. They were the youngest class in the year band and although they were to be in primary 2, most of them would not be six until this first term. There was a rather large group of immature boys who had made little visible literacy progress during their first year in school. However, they were bright, alert and articulate and hopefully ready for rapid progress! There was one little girl who was a cause for concern because she had chosen not to speak in the previous class for the two months that she had attended the school. Her only utterances were for essential needs like ‘toilet’. Her parents assured us that she spoke at home, but there had been many upheavals and changes during her short life. There was another child with a heart condition that meant she needed particular care and attention. Of the group, six children had English as an additional language.

I really wanted these children to feel the high priority that I give to reading, so I was keen to capture their interest in books straightaway. I found just the text I was looking for in We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury. In this book were all the ingredients I needed. There was a gripping story, an easily remembered repetitive pattern, predictability, suspense, excellent illustrations and it was large enough for all the children to see when I held the book up.

I copied the text onto big sheets of card, using colour to highlight different aspects of the text, in particular the repetitive pattern. I then pinned them up around the room and stood back to admire my handiwork. It was at this point that Bear’s conception occurred. My thirteen-year-old daughter had come to school with me because she was bored with the holidays and said that she would come to ‘help’ me. In retrospect I am pleased that my stress levels were so low that I said ‘yes’, for such help usually involved valuable time being spent finding things to occupy the helper. She looked at the story around the walls and said, ‘You know what we should do, Mum, we should make a Bear, a big Bear and put him in a cave in the corner.’ I agreed because it seemed a good way to keep her occupied while I got on with important tasks. Clare went off to the cupboards where all the costumes are kept for assemblies and plays. She came back about half an hour later with a brown woolly bear suit, that would fit an eleven-year-old child, paws, feet and head dress in the same fabric and yards and yards of black fabric which had been bought to be used as a backdrop. The only material that we had to hand to stuff the suit was newspaper. Bear was stuffed with screwed-up paper and so he took shape, albeit rather a lumpy shape. We had a problem with the head as obviously a child’s angelic face was supposed to smile from the headpiece. This problem was solved by using a pair of brown tights, stuffed with newspaper. The legs went into the body and the ‘bottom’ made a chubby head. By this stage we were getting enthusiastic and so the eyes were cut out from felt and carefully stitched into place along with a nose and smiling mouth. The black fabric was draped in one corner and Bear was put inside his cave. To accompany him there was a jam jar, bearing a label decorated with bees which said ‘honey’, and some good books: Are You There Bear? by Ron Maris, Can’t You Sleep Little Bear? by Martin Waddell and Hairy Bear by Joy Cowley. We stood back and admired our creation. This really was going to be a lot of fun. I went home excited, my imagination already ‘working overtime’.

Enter the children

The next morning the children arrived, greeting old friends with enthusiasm and this new teacher with scepticism. I led them up to the classroom where they unpacked their school bags, chatted, had a nervous glance around the room and then gravitated towards the carpet where they, by force of habit, or training, sat down. No one mentioned, or investigated the black mass in the corner of the room. We started our Bear Hunt story straightaway and it was an immediate success. We read it through a number of times throughout the next few days, savouring the words and experiencing the illustrations which are so good that it almost seems possible to step inside the story. Soon everyone could join in reading the text. It gave the hesitant readers a tremendous morale boost with this new teacher, who might discover the ‘truth’ about their reading ability another day.

We set to work illustrating my displayed copy of the text and as they worked, gradually the children began to peep behind the black cloth. It was uncanny. Nobody shouted. The news went round like a Chinese whisper. First one went to look and then another, until at last one of the children came over to me and said, ‘Did you know there’s a bear in this classroom?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ They looked at me and grinned. The children seemed to glow with the pleasure of it all and that radiance stayed with them right through the year and beyond. A bright idea had gone right to the hearts of the children and the over-riding emotion engendered was love.

Joanna

For about a week, Joanna, the child who would not speak, watched. I had decided not to force speech on her, but to wait for her confidence to develop. I talked to her but never invited a response. She began to relax, to smile, to touch. Then one day she crawled into the cave and began to speak to the Bear. This was repeated three or four times a day. She would stay with him for about five minutes and Bear would smile at her and hug her. It might sound as though I have launched into a complete flight of fancy, but that is in fact what she did; snuggling up to the newspaper- stuffed suit, putting the floppy arms around her, and telling him the things she would not tell anyone else. I used to watch and listen, but from a distance. I am a good eavesdropper. It’s a very valuable accomplishment in a classroom. One day I noticed a difference in Joanna’s speech, a uniformity in her words, a rhythm . . . she was reading. There she was sitting on the Bear’s lap reading Hairy Bear fluently, closely followed by Can’t You Sleep Little Bear? I looked into the cave. ‘Did he like the stories?’ I asked. ‘Yes, he loved them’ she replied. I crossed my fingers, took a deep breath, and asked, ‘Will you read me a story?’ Joanna smiled, nodded, moved over and I crawled in with her and Bear. Fortunately peace was reigning in the rest of the room. From that day on her confidence grew, along with her ability to communicate verbally with me. She also began to talk a little with her classmates. They had become accustomed to ignoring her, not through any kind of malice, but with the matter-of-factness of six year olds. ‘Well, Joanna doesn’t speak’ is what they used to say, but not any more.

It was, I think at this point that I realised that there was a powerful force at work in my classroom.

Out of the cave

One morning when the children came to school they were delighted to find that the Bear had come out of his cave and he was sitting in the large comfy reading chair. He had a book on his lap, but it was the wrong way up. They were amused and concerned, ‘He doesn’t even know which way up the book should be,’ said one beginning reader. We talked about it, as we talked often about this business called reading, and they decided that ‘it’ just hadn’t happened for him yet and perhaps we should help him. I watched with amusement as they took on my role as facilitator; selecting a big book, making sure that he was listening as well as looking. They would read him the story pointing to the words, and then go back to the beginning and play word games with the text. These sessions always attracted a group of helpers, usually the less able readers, who willingly joined in to help Bear read, thus helping themselves, by reinforcing their word knowledge and deepening their understanding and fluency. He made good progress, but never chose to read anything at night that was beyond the capability of the weakest reader. I talked with the children often about how this ‘reading thing’ happens, telling them that for some strange reason some children read before others, just as some crawl, walk, roller skate, ride a two-wheeler bike, skip, swim and grow tall before others.

Teaching the Bear to read was fun, learning to read themselves became fun too. For most of the slower starters the pressure had been relieved by the presence of our Bear, who was always behind the weakest of them.

There were, however, three children whose reading development worried me. One was Ann, the only girl in the class who had not begun to read. She felt that she was different to her friends and therefore needed careful handling and observation. David had a sister experiencing problems further up the school and his mother had decided to teach him to read her way, using a totally phonic approach, and a regime of instruction that involved half an hour a day of hard ‘no nonsense’ work. Then there was John, who had no phonemic awareness, a hesitancy in his speech, a poor memory and many reversals in his attempts to write.

. . . and into literacy

When I was busy, Bear would ‘listen to the children read’. He never had to stop a story to deal with another child or to sort out a crisis. He was never in a hurry, he never suggested that a word was easy, or that the child should ‘sound it out’, he just kept right on smiling and enjoyed every book. Over the year he must have heard hundreds, some of them over and over again. I was able to stand back, to observe and to eavesdrop on these sessions. Sometimes two children would share a book with Bear. Often the partnership would be a strong reader and a weaker peer. They helped each other to become more fluent and more confident.

The level of phonemic awareness was an area that concerned me. We therefore collected and learned rhymes that we thought would amuse the Bear. One particular favourite was:

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Turn around,
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Touch the ground.
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Go upstairs,
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,
Say your prayers.

As they chanted the words someone would help Bear to do the actions. It was a rhyme not only spoken, but also written clearly for all to see. We looked closely at the rhyming words. We noted the letter pattern in ‘ground’ and saw that ‘round’ is the same, but in ‘stairs’, ‘prayers’ and, for that matter, ‘bears’ it is different. What a silly language English is, so we have to look closely and try to remember. Whilst all this phonemic reinforcement, for those who needed it, and visual awareness training, for those who were ready for it, was going on, we spent a considerable amount of time each day, as a class and in small groups, sitting around the easel watching and listening whilst I modelled writing. Children need to be talked through how to cope with difficult spelling and to see how competent writers think about their writing. They need to hear those inner conversations we have with ourselves, ‘one c, two s’s in necessary, or is it two c’s and one s?’ If all they ever see is adults effortlessly dashing off letters, as they struggle to cope with the ‘thank you’ variety, it is no wonder that they feel inadequate to the task.

Many of these children needed a lot of time to practise, and they needed meaningful topics to motivate them to write.

Bear provided the purpose

Exercise books, and sheets of lined paper can be very daunting to the early years writer, and often to writers of any age, so paper of various sizes, colours and shapes was on hand. We even had some Bear shapes. We started to quietly raid the art store for thin sheets of coloured painting paper, which we cut up and made into little books, again of different shapes and sizes. ‘Bear bubbles’, our version of speech bubbles, were particularly popular because they allowed the child who couldn’t write very well to have a finished product that they were pleased with. I drew pictures of the Bear in different poses and venues and the children would select any one and write in the speech bubble. There was also another reason for their success, which I will return to in detail in the second part of the book. This is where I set you, the reader, a challenge to see if the ‘penny drops’ for you more quickly than it did for me.

A variety of speech bubble sheets were always available, some with just the Bear, others with the Bear and a friend. Soon the children were creating their own which they photocopied and added to the box. They also decided that they wanted some real books to write their stories in, so we made individual ‘Bear Books’ which were kept on the book stands next to the ‘real books’. They all liked this arrangement and enjoyed reading each other’s books, thus establishing an audience for their efforts. Having used the word ‘efforts’ I pause, because the lasting memory of that year was one of ‘effortless’ learning. I don’t mean to belittle the children’s work, but they wrote because they wanted to, with pleasure and enthusiasm. I don’t remember having to cajole anyone.

Out of the classroom

In our school the class assembly was a feature that instilled fear in many teachers, probably because the parents were invited and it was seen by some as a testing ground where comparisons abounded and reputations were forged or crushed. In a school where consistency of approach was established, there seemed to be no rules, even time didn’t seem to be of importance. Performances would frequently overrun into playtime, smart teachers opting for playground duty on Wednesdays.

With a sinking feeling I broached the subject of our impending trial to the children. Instantly one little voice piped up, ‘It’s no problem, we’ll tell them the story of Edward Bear.’ So that is what we did, we dramatised the original story and because we all knew that Edward Bear wouldn’t be able to chase the children back through the forest and the river and the swirling grass, one of the children acted his part. Nobody ever said ‘he’s not real’, we all just covered for his inadequacies. On the day of the performance one little boy announced that his Mum had said that Edward Bear could sit with her to watch the ’sembly. So there we were, doing our show, with the Bear sitting on the lap of a mother who had not been known for her involvement before.

The assembly was a success. Well, we all enjoyed it and the children spoke up beautifully because they wanted the Bear to hear every single word. At the end all the parents wanted to meet the Bear. It was all their children talked about when they got home from school. One mother said, ‘They are having so much fun, and doing so well too.’ The magic seemed to be stretching out from school and into the homes.

After that Edward started to get out and about more. He visited the playground, watched a PE lesson, he couldn’t join in because he didn’t have his kit . . . and thoroughly enjoyed being allowed to go to music lessons.

There was one memorable incident that I have to share. The phenomenon of separate toilets for boys and girls is something which young children entering school find strange. After all, at home eve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred?’
• Chapter 1: ‘Or In the Heart or In the Head’
• Chapter 2: ‘Where Begot, How Nourished?’
• Chapter 3: ‘Reply, Reply’
• Chapter 4: Motivation to Write
• Chapter 5: Motivation to Read
• Chapter 6: The Whole Child
• Chapter 7: The Whole Curriculum
• Chapter 8: ‘He Was Real On the Inside’
• Chapter 9: Implications for Practice
• Bibliography