The High-Performing Preschool

"Masterful.... presents a cogent and compelling picture of preschool programs serving low socioeconomic status students who achieve equity and excellence." - Choice
The High-Performing Preschool takes readers into the lives of three- and four-year-old Head Start students during their first year of school and focuses on the centerpiece of their school day: story acting. In this activity, students act out stories from high-quality children's literature as well as stories dictated by their peers. Drawing on a unique pair of thinkers-Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and renowned American teacher and educational writer Vivian G. Paley-Gillian Dowley McNamee elucidates the ways, and reasons, this activity is so successful. She shows how story acting offers a larger blueprint for curricula that helps ensure all preschools-not just those for society's well-to-do-are excellent.
McNamee outlines how story acting cultivates children's oral and written language skills. She shows how it creates a crucial opportunity for teachers to guide children inside the interior logic and premises of an idea, and how it fosters the creation of a literary community. Starting with Vygotsky and Paley, McNamee paints a detailed portrait of high-quality preschool teaching, showing how educators can deliver on the promise of Head Start and provide a setting for all young children to become articulate, thoughtful, and literate learners.
"As McNamee demonstrates in detail, a classroom is never simply a setting: by engaging what is already there-the students' ideas, imaginations, experiences, stories, relations, and conversations-it becomes a powerful source of development." -Luis C. Moll, University of Arizona