Wally's Stories

By Vivian Gussin Paley

Book Overview

Teachers are often taught that young children are incapable of logical thought. Prone to fantasy and unruffled by inconsistency, preschool children are frequently baffled by the first lessons of early schooling. Trained to gently resist the child's illogic, teachers sometimes create just the incomprehension and anxiety they mean to avoid. In Wally's Stories, Vivian Paley shows that none of this need be so.

Wally's Stories is itself a story: the story of the evolution of a kindergarten classroom in which Paley learned to stop fighting childish fantasy and instead make use of it to stimulate the very best brand of thinking her five-year-olds can muster. Stories also lie at the heart of her classroom: stories that are first told by one of the children, then transcribed by the teacher, and then acted out by the class in dramatic productions of their own design. Paley shows that in the course of creating their own dramatic world, five-year-olds are capable of thought and language far in advance of what they accomplish in traditional classroom exercises. The children's stories also become a vehicle that they can use to explain themselves to their teacher and to one another. Together, teacher and children develop an unusual environment, one that is logical and literate, based on rules of fairness, friendship, and fantasy.

Vivian Paley's book is as refreshing as her teaching method--a new kind of book about a new kind of classroom.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067494593X
• ISBN13: 9780674945937
• Release Date: August 1987
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Delightful

If you enjoy being around children and hearing how they talk and think, you will enjoy this book. As a classroom teacher I found it to be a refreshing contrast to our current climate in education of high stakes testing and our push to turn children into mini-achievers at a very early age. I have bought several copies of this book to share with colleagues, friends and family.

delightful look into a preschool classroom

This is a funny, thoughtful collection of young children's conversations compiled over the course of a year. The teacher's observations and reflections helped me rethink the conversations I hear in my own classroom.

If You Want To Learn....

If you are willing to learn from children, I recommend this fascinating book. Paley's taped conversations and stories from her Kindergarten classes reveal the engaged young minds at work; their creativity and inventiveness is genuine and persistent; experience is never so important as imagination.The narratives that the children invent reveal how their minds work, how they search for meaning, and how the best explanations need not be the most rational. I recommend this book for anyone who has children or who works with children. Also, I recommend it for anyone who is intrigued about why we search for meaning, why we tell stories, why we invent and create. "Out of the mouths of babes...."

Fascinating

I'm supposed to read this book for a child development course I'm taking here at school. That is, I'm supposed to read it a month from now, but I'm reading it for pleasure. For pleasure! I never read for pleasure, but I can't put this book down. Full of anecdotal material from a kindergarten class, this is as truthful a look at kids as will ever be published.