How Play in the Kindergarten Classroom Can Suport Student Success in Meeting the California Language Arts Standards
This thesis provides a literature review on how kindergarten students use play to understand their world, how play supports literacy and language development, and the components of an effective play environment for kindergarten students. Furthermore, this paper includes a study of kindergarten students and their use of play in the classroom. The study focuses on how kindergarten students construct meaning through their play experiences and how these experiences, within the context of a developmentally-appropriate kindergarten classroom, support student achievement in mastering the California Language Arts Standards. The findings from this study show how. through self-directed play, students examine several language arts concepts: emergent writing, concepts of print, letter recognition, phonemic awareness, story retelling, and phonetic decoding.
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