All the World’s a Stage! So Let’s Rehearse!

On a recent visit to my son and his family, the granddaughters made me their customer as they played restaurant one afternoon.

I sat reading the paper in their dad’s favorite chair.

“Would you like to come have something to eat at out new restaurant?” I heard a tiny voice ask from behind the newsprint. “We’re almost ready for customers.”

Naturally I said yes.

“Okay, we’ll be ready soon,” Ally, the older of the two, said as she skipped away. “Just look for the sign on the door.”

I waited for a while, then went upstairs where I saw “Open” in crayon on a piece of tablet paper taped to Olivia’s door.

As I walked inside, Ally met me with a polite greeting, asked how many were in my party, and seated me. I was charmed as she handed me a hand-drawn menu.

She stood aside as I examined the menu. When she came back, I made my choices and she took my order to first grader Olivia, who had been busy the whole time in the dormer of her bedroom. This area had been sectioned off with the play kitchen her father had had as a young child. As in most restaurants, there was a little tension between the server and the chef about my order.

“One at a time! One at a time!” Chef Olivia demanded of her sister. “I can only do one at a time.”

She was definitely in charge in the kitchen.

Not long afterwards my server (Ally) delivered a plate of plastic pizza, fried eggs, and hamburger—my order. (I was playing, too, after all!)

I pretended to eat, asked for my bill, worked out a 15 % tip, and was on my way.

All this put me in mind of why and how we teach reading and writing in our schools.

In Readacide, Kelly Galleger references Kenneth Burke’s contention that reading fiction is an “imaginary rehearsal” for life. We read fiction to understand our lives and to imagine lives, worlds, beyond our own. James Wood writes in How Fiction Works that noticing in fiction makes us better noticers in life and noticing in life makes us better makers of fiction. It is a kind of training and rehearsal.

We have long said the same thing about play in children, as I recently saw in my grandchildren. I played a part in an imaginative rehearsal of what it might be like to be a chef in a restaurant, of how it might feel to greet diners as they came through the door. We were involved in play that integrated observed knowledge—How have we seen restaurants operate?—with an imaginative rehearsal of what that experience might be like.

Children, like the rest of us, are trying to figure out not only how things work, but also their place in how things work.

Reading stories and poems—and, I’d argue, writing stories and poems—is a rehearsal akin in spirit to playing restaurant. It’s a getting ready to understand and take part in our world, a kind of dramatic play.

If all of that is sensible, and it is, why do we make reading and writing such work for kids? How can we infuse the teaching of these skills with more spirit of play?