Phonics and Play Are on the Same Team
If you have been following the news about reading, you may have heard that a new season of Sold a Story is out and centers on Direct Instruction. I am glad people are talking about how young children learn to read, because families and teachers want the same thing, which is children who leave the early grades confident and capable.
I have spent thirty years in this work as a parent, a teacher, and a researcher. I have come to believe that young children learn to read best when explicit teaching and playful, active learning work side by side. I want to make the case for the second half of that sentence, because it is the half that gets squeezed first when schools feel pressure.
What explicit teaching gives children
Careful, well-sequenced teaching helps children. A large review of fifty years of research on Direct Instruction found gains in reading, math, and spelling, with larger gains for children who started in kindergarten. Phonics earns its place too. Reading researchers describe it as one well-supported part of a bigger picture, and Timothy Shanahan, who helped lead the National Reading Panel, says the scientists who know the most about this “don’t buy in to the idea that it’s phonics first or phonics only.”
Most of the studies in that review compared the program with ordinary classroom practice. We know much less about how it compares with playful approaches, or how well the two work together.
Why one story is rarely enough
Test scores invite simple stories, and they rarely hold still long enough to support them. National fourth grade reading scores peaked around 2015, well before the pandemic and before the current wave of reading laws. Alabama’s average moved from 212 in 2019 to 213 in 2024, which means it held steady while many states fell. Louisiana scored 216 in 2024, the same as in 2015. Mississippi’s gains followed more than a decade of coordinated work that included coaching, screening, and changes to teacher preparation.
I share these numbers to encourage care, not to argue with anyone’s approach. States with lasting improvement tend to invest in teachers, funding, and coherent instruction together. Reading grows within a whole set of conditions.
Why play belongs in literacy
Picture a kindergarten corner set up as a bakery. Children write orders on scraps of paper, argue over who gets to read the menu, stretch out the sounds in “cake” for a sign, and retell the day’s rush to a friend at cleanup. Nobody handed them a worksheet. They are using talk, print, and story for a reason, which is what readers and writers do.
Researchers who study play describe a range, from play that children direct themselves to play that a teacher plans around a skill. Each part of the range has a job. Free play builds oral language and self-regulation, while teacher-planned play can target specific skills such as letter sounds. I would go further and say that for a five-year-old, play is often where language, print, and story first make sense. Engagement also matters to reading itself, and researchers now treat it as part of how reading works.
Scarborough’s Reading Rope shows many strands twisting together, from sounds and word recognition to vocabulary and background knowledge. A recent model of reading builds on that picture by treating the child as a climber and the teacher as the person on the ground who decides how much support to give and when to ease off. A bakery corner can pull on several strands at once. A teacher who watches closely can see what support a child needs next, and sometimes that means teaching a skill directly.
What I have seen in kindergarten
In a Title I study, two kindergarten teachers used the same district curriculum, and one added guided play. Reading gains were larger in her classroom. This was one small pair of classrooms that were not randomly assigned, so I offer it as a picture of what is possible and not as proof.
Why this is a question of fairness
Children who are labeled at risk are often the first to lose play and the ones who receive the most drill-style instruction. Joy and agency should be part of every child’s path to reading, and they should not be a reward for the children who are already ahead.
Something to notice
The next time you watch a child learning to read, at school or at your kitchen table, notice where practice and play overlap. What would you want that child to say about learning to read?
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