“There were not established curriculums for two year olds, three year olds, four year olds. There were things that schools did, you know everyone knew the kids, the kinds of toys kids played with, and stuff like that, but it was really up to each teaching team to decide how they were going to create the educational component, or educational environment. We all strongly believed, and I think it is still understood to be best practices, that for children playing is learning, learning is playing. Playing is .. you know, learning is not work. It's playing. You know, you learn through play. So we all shared ideas about how to use the equipment, how to deal with certain kinds of interactions, how to deal with parents, that kind of thing, we were learning some of the ... as I said some of the teachers were professionals, some of us just had experience. But we were learning from each other. We did not have lesson plans, we did not tell parents that in the course of this your child will ... um, but I'd say for the four year old group, the A group, parents did have more concern about that. And I can't remember if I said this to you before, I think this was in the second year, not the first, but this was an African American boy, and I remember the parents meeting that I attended of that class, he had been listening to some conversation and he stood up and said: you know, it's okay for some of you, for your children not to be learning the alphabet. It's not okay for my son. When he goes to kindergarten, he needs to know his alphabet, and how are you going to teach that to him? And we all understood immediately what he was talking about."
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