A deep dive into teacher Vivian Paley's method of fantasy play by preschool children that she stumbled into by accident but was theorized about long ago by Soviet psychologist Vygotsky. She has what appears to be an impressive corpus of actual fantasy play conversations which she has woven together to form a cohesive story, narrated by her thoughts and reflections.

I especially love Paley's meta reflections on her past and how, as a new teacher, she once was Jason, the loner child who does not understand the unspoken rules of fantasy play and cannot hear what is going on around him despite it being obvious to all present. Likewise, I am impressed by her conclusion that the timeout chair is actually a violation of children's sense of fair play and that children's construction of a fantasy narrative with its hidden sense of fair play and rules is sufficient to self-police the world of preschool. I suspect only someone truly immersed and accepting of this fantasy world would allow their rules to question the fairness and appropriateness of her own methods. One interesting part of children's sense of fair play is the right of any child to suddenly require attention and be disruptive.

It is interesting how the children consider fairy tales and books read by the teacher to be "real", and therefore potentially scary, but anything happening in their self-made fantasy stories can be extreme and include self death etc but is not considered scary to the participants.

Therefore, fantasy play allows the children to go places that they do not go in "real" activities under teacher rules.

Conversations are retold by her verbatim, with poor child grammar and all. A wonderful "deep dive" into this classroom's ongoing fantasy world, as children's characters and stories maintain continuity and themes through the year. Main focus of Paley is Jason, who does not seem to understand the concept of cooperative fantasy play and its rules. Slowly he is inexorably socialized by his peers through their relentless efforts to include him in stories on terms he can accept. The children pick up on the teacher's constant attempts to include him and make it their own cause, and ultimately only the children succeed on their own terms.