It is widely accepted these days that preschool and primary grade classrooms should be print-rich places that provide abundant opportunities for children to read and write. Plenty of books, displays of children's work, well-provisioned activity centers, labels and messages that describe and inform -- these are the telltale signs of a literate place. How to build, maintain, and actively involve young children in a literate environment, however, remains a challenging endeavor for most teachers because the essential goal is an educative one. Children are to learn more about reading and writing through their interactions with their immediate literate environment. We want them to gain new skills, learn new words, meet new ideas, and at the same time practice and secure what they know to new levels of competence. Creating an environment that supports and expands literacy learning in these ways is not simple. It requires bringing together space, time, materials, and activity in deliberate ways that create communication as well interactions between children and things in a “network of possible connections and constructions” (Gandini in Vecchi, 1998, p. 163). This demands considerable forethought, deliberation, design, and commitment to transform the elements of environment into literacy learning opportunities.

Let's take up the research lesson at hand. What we have are examples drawn from a thematic unit entitled “Colors, Dots, Objects, Shapes, and Drips: Making Impressions in Art” that was carried out in a diverse classroom of 4-year-olds (9 boys and 8 girls) at Hathaway Brown School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA. Building off children's enthusiasm surrounding a trip to the local art museum, the teachers' intentions in this theme were to feature five modern artists and the critical elements of their style: Claude Monet, colors; Paul Seurat, dots; Jasper Johns, objects; Pablo Picasso, shapes; and Jackson Pollock, drips. In helping the children explore and experience these artists' work on their own terms the teachers had three broad instructional aims:

1. To promote creative representation through art media
2. To support children's ability to classify and describe images
3. To develop their ability to make comparisons between images and pictures (Hohmann & Weikart, 1995)

Specific to literacy, the teachers were guiding the children to use language to describe, to explore writing and writing tools, to read in various ways (storybooks, signs, symbols, and their own writing), and to actively participate in story dictation related to classroom experiences. They engaged the children, for example, in a text innovation based on Dr. Seuss's My Many Colored Days that produced a beautiful big book telling about the children's “many colored days.” They also helped the children write their impressions of art pieces and explain their own creative pieces.

As in many early childhood classrooms, the play environment was arranged to support the ideas, vocabulary, and objects of the theme in a variety of ways. For the “Making Impressions...” theme, the entire classroom was transformed into an atelier, an art studio that included a workshop for creating with media, a book-browsing area for looking and reading, a writing table for composing, a bookmaking area for organizing and compiling, and a storybook reading area for listening to books and sharing. A sampling of the material, resources, and activities built into these places is provided in Figure 1. The teachers also incorporated a fine blend of related storybooks and informational texts into the course of the theme, such as Round Trip by Ann Jonas, Mouse Paint by Ellen Stoll Walsh, People and Places: The Museum of Modern Art by Philip Yenawine, The Science Book of Color by Neil Ardley, and the poem “Color” by Christina Rossetti, to name a few.

The object of our koukai kenkyuu jugyou (public research lesson) is the quality of the play environment turned art studio as a context for early literacy experience. First we will examine the environment as a physical setting supportive of literacy interactions and development. A series of photographs, taken from different perspectives in the classroom, are presented, along with a print inventory of the setting. We will study the physical setting with three design criteria (to be described in a moment) in mind. The second half of the lesson focuses on two short video clips representative of children's activity in the art studio. Here we will pay special attention to children's language and literacy, looking for the “connections and constructions” that help them learn to read and write. Once again we will rely on several criteria to guide our observing and assessing.

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