here. We begin exercising their fingers with soft playdough, then
move on to the stiffer beeswax clay, then to the really stiff clay . . .
and by that time, their fingers are strong enough to work the pen-
cil." I stared at her, aghast, silent. "Yep." She nodded with assurance.
"It's all in the fingers, it's all in the fingers."

I didn't even stay the morning. And from that day on, as I traveled
from one nursery school to another, I looked with a new sense of
direction. Whether children were building towers with blocks, mak-
ing masks with paper bags, or sculpting duck ponds with playdough, I
listened to hear whether the adults who were there were celebrating
the talk, the emerging stories. When children gathered for juice and
crackers, I watched for signs that this was a time for teachers and
children to muse over plans for the day, to share family stories, to
retell favorite movie plots, to swap yarns. During recess, I checked
whether the big people were bending low to listen to the little people.

In one school after another, I paid particular attention to the
teachers' attitudes toward children's talk. I did this because yes,
indeed, that duck story was foundational to those girls' growth as
writers, and as readers, thinkers, problem-solvers, and world
builders. Had the director of that school meant what I initially
thought she meant, had she truly understood that the story those
girls created around their three blobs of clay was foundational to
their later writing, reading, and learning, I would probably have
enrolled my son in her school.

Parents spend an enormous amount of time worrying about their
children's reading and writing development for they know those
capabilities are at the foundation of learning. But talk is also at the
foundation of a child's learning life. Through language, meaning is
built. Playing with playdough can be a time to hammer, roll, smush,
and pinch, and nothing more; but it can also be a time to spin stories,
to elaborate and reflect on them, to live inside them.

In the end, it's not what we do that matters, it's what we do with
what we do that matters. A child can pat a ball of playdough flat, and
simply be squashing that ball into a pancake, or she can be inventing,
exploring, hypothesizing, planning, connecting, analyzing, imagin-
ing, and deducting. For young children, the difference is in the talk.

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