On the day of the Living Wax Museum, she keeps in mind something else Mr. Chen had said to her:“ What if you picked one sentence to say with strong feeling? Which matters most?” Throughout the experience, she delivers her speech with confidence, using eye contact and gestures.
In this vignette, Mr. Chen did not correct Maya or take over her performance; instead, he asked questions that invited her to connect emotionally with her subject and make her own decisions about how to bring the speech to life. This reflects what the research describes as timely scaffolding grounded in a child’ s developmental trajectory: Observing where a learner is, meeting them there, and offering just enough support to move them forward without redirecting their agency( Weisberg et al. 2013, 2016). For a multilingual learner performing in their second language before an audience, this was also a moment of equity. Mr. Chen’ s coaching affirmed that Maya’ s voice was capable and powerful.
Although the vignette focused on one child’ s project, Mr. Chen structured scaffolds throughout to ensure everyone in his class could access the learning goals of the Living Wax Museum. Gerald, a child with dyslexia, used speech-to-text for drafting and received a highlighted, large-print script. Children who were excelling in their research were challenged to connect their figures to current events. Collaborative rehearsals incorporated sentence stems, such as“ I learned _____”;“ I wonder _____”; and“ What if you tried _____?” Individualized scaffolding is central to effective guided play( Weisberg et al. 2013, 2016).
Mr. Chen monitored children’ s progress by reviewing their research notebooks, in which they took notes on the primary and secondary sources they used. He reviewed their drafted and revised speeches, and he used performance rubrics focused on historical accuracy, perspective taking, and oral delivery. He also gathered information from families. Mr. Chen noted that Maya’ s family shared that she had practiced frequently at home. This points to something research consistently affirms: When children have genuine agency over their learning, their motivation follows( Weisberg et al. 2016; Hirsh-Pasek et al. 2020). The Living Wax Museum was not a break from academic work; it was the vehicle for it.
Guided Play in Math Instruction
First-grade teacher Ms. Rivera works in a public school where leaders and staff are trying to incorporate more naturebased learning into their curriculum. She has also heard the children in her classroom talk about how they wish they could go outside and play in the snow, so she designs a Snowball Sale project. It is a great opportunity to bring repeated addition and early multiplication concepts to life outdoors and to work toward Colorado’ s firstgrade mathematics standards, which focus on solving word problems using objects and repeated addition. The activity will also prepare children for the grouping and multiplication concepts coming in second grade.
Ms. Rivera creates several“ selling stations” that can each accommodate up to five children. For the first 30 minutes of the activity, children work in small groups to create snowballs of all sizes and sort them into sets of one, two, or three. During this process, Ms. Rivera prompts them with questions, such as“ Can you sort 13 snowballs into sets of 2?” or“ Should larger snowballs cost more than smaller ones? Why or why not?” The children decide what the sizes of the snowballs will be and how they will group them. Finally, they set the prices. After a spirited discussion over how much more a larger snowball
24 Young Children
Fall 2026