A four-year-old proudly reciting the alphabet can look impressively “ready”. So can a completed worksheet or a page of carefully traced numbers. This is easy for adults to see.
What is harder to see is the thinking happening when the same child spends twenty minutes trying to stop a block tower from falling, works out how to share pretend food between friends or changes an idea when the first idea doesn’t work.
“There is understandable pressure on parents to make sure their child is not falling behind,” says Ursula Assis, Managing Director of Dibber International Preschools South Africa. “The difficulty comes when we start judging early learning mainly by what a young child can perform for us on demand.”
This is not an argument against teaching letters, numbers or early literacy. South Africa’s National Curriculum Framework for children from birth to four includes language and mathematics as important parts of early learning. It also recognises play and hands-on experiences as central to children’s development.
What Counts as Learning?
The question is what we recognise as learning when we see it. A correct answer is quick and easy to praise. A child building a bridge from wooden blocks may produce something far less neat. The bridge collapses. They change the base, try again and ask another child to help.
Yet in that experience, the child may be problem-solving, testing an idea, developing spatial awareness, and learning how to persist when something does not work.
“The learning that is easiest to measure can sometimes receive the most attention,” Assis says. “A finished page is visible. The thinking behind play requires us to stop and really watch.”
An American Academy of Paediatrics clinical report describes play as supporting language, cognitive development, self-regulation and social-emotional skills, while also cautioning against increasing didactic academic teaching at the expense of playful learning.
Performing a Skill vs Understanding It
A preschooler who can recite the alphabet has learnt something useful. But singing a sequence of letters is different from understanding that individual letters represent sounds and eventually form words. In the same way, counting to 20 is not quite the same as understanding what 20 objects actually look like.
Play gives children opportunities to use those emerging skills in context. Counting cups while setting a table connects number words with real quantities. Looking for the first letter of a child’s name on a sign makes print personally meaningful.
A Busy Classroom Isn’t a Less Effective One
A room full of quiet children completing the same activity is easy to interpret. A preschool classroom where one child is building, another is pouring sand between containers, and two are negotiating over a saucepan may look considerably less organised. A less orderly classroom does not mean less learning.
A systematic review and meta-analysis led by University of Cambridge researchers examined 39 studies of guided play involving children aged one to eight. Guided play showed benefits over direct instruction for some outcomes, including early mathematics and shape knowledge, although researchers found no advantages in every area.
That distinction is important. Play-based learning does not mean adults disappear and children are left entirely on their own. Skilled educators still plan, introduce ideas, ask questions and know when to step in.
Readiness Is About More Than Letters and Numbers
Emerging literacy and numeracy matter, but children entering formal schooling also learn to communicate needs, participate in a group, cope with frustration, and persist when something is difficult.
At Dibber, this thinking forms part of its Nordic-inspired approach, where exploration, play and adult guidance sit alongside early literacy, numeracy, science and problem-solving.
“We want children to encounter all of those areas,” Assis says. “But we want them to do so in ways that make sense for their age. There is a difference between helping a child learn and asking a young child to prove that learning before they are ready.”
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