It is through play that children explore their environments, gather information, negotiate identities, and experiment with ideas and concepts. For young children who are not yet confident articulating verbally, play serves as a mode of expressing thoughts, feelings, and a particular reality of thinking exclusive to a child. Developmental psychologist Piaget advocated that play facilitates, enriches, and is essential for cognitive development, ‘and helps a child cope with the world without risking defeat or jeopardizing feelings of independence.’ Play is essential to promoting literacy development in young children. It is a vital part of young children’s lives and provides many opportunities to make classroom learning fun and relatively easy. Creating an early childhood classroom that is rich and dripping with elements of literacy is crucial to promoting, fostering, and cultivating, successful, independent, and enthusiastic readers. Successful early childhood literacy programmes provide interesting, challenging, and engaging environments, in which children are inspired to think, question, reason, and become decision makers. In the early childhood classroom, children should engage in child-centered play in structured, large group settings such as circle time, read-alouds, and acting out plays. Children should also be given ample amounts of time to engage in self-initiated, independent play activities. This article considers some of the ways in which the early childhood classroom environment can be arranged to facilitate emerging literacy skills utilizing play as the instructional medium for literacy development.

Morning meeting offers a routine time at the beginning of the day in which children and teachers gather to greet each other, share thoughts and feelings, sing songs, play games, read poetry and create a respectful learning environment that establishes a climate of trust and understanding. Morning meeting merges social, emotional, and intellectual growth motivating children by making them feel a sense of belonging and by the common need of all children to have fun. Activities in morning meeting should promote literacy development through exploring the playful nature of language. Sharing and learning tongue twisters, riddles, poems, nursery rhymes, playing word games, and singing songs all promote literacy by developing strong oral language skills, print awareness, and by illustrating the various functions of words and sounds.

The establishment of learning corners is an essential component of the early childhood classroom. Learning corners are areas/activities throughout your program that allow children to manipulate and play with various materials, explore ideas, discover consequences, build, create and express themselves through various hands-on mediums. Through participation and engagement in learning centers, children are empowered to make their own choices, solve problems, and extend their understanding to create new knowledge. Learning center activities should be organized so that children can independently function at the center and be open-ended enough to encourage children to extend the activity or create alternatives. If the activity chosen does not fulfill these expectations, rethink. (Example: A coloring book page does not help a child make choices, solve problems or create. Giving children a pre-made page is not a good activity for a learning center.)

The possibilities for various literacy learning centers are practically endless and depend on the constant creativity, enthusiasm, and dedication that a teacher holds for her students and classroom. The following are a few examples to try in the classroom and to inspire teachers to research and create other possible literacy center activities.

WRITING CORNER:
The writing center offers children the opportunity to play with various writing tools and concepts and to gain an understanding of the conventions of print. In the preschool and kindergarten years children love to “write” long letters and make infinite cards for their friends and family. It may seem that they are just scribbling nonsense, but they are really practicing their emerging writing skills. Those seemly nonsense scribbles have complex stories and thoughts behind them, thus it is imperative that teachers and parents engage in conversations about what the child has written. As children continue to develop their writing skills throughout kindergarten the scribbles begin to take the form of recognizable words as children begin to utilize their surrounding environment to copy and create words. Some activities that children can do in the writing center are: writing their names in sand or shaving cream, creating a post office where children can send their friends letters and cards complete with stamps and envelopes, or they can simply write with the various writing materials provided by the teacher (markers, different sizes of papers, pencils, pens, crayons, etc.)

LIBRARY CORNER:
The library is an extremely important center in the development of emerging literacy skills. The library provides children the opportunity to “play” reading. It is where they can manipulate books and “go through the motions’ of reading a book by looking at the pictures and telling the story in their own words. During their time in the library children are developing a love of reading and creating important literacy habits. Children are also learning to recognize letters in words and increase their vocabulary. Ascetically it is important to make the library area comfortable and engaging. Simple home-made pillows, a small colorful carpet, and child-sized book shelves will make the library area an enjoyable place for children to settle down with a good book!