Innovative Early Education Outreach that Actually Reaches the Children – Play Smart Literacy

Amanda Morgan (Host): In this episode, I’m joined by Michelle Dineen-White, the founder of PlaySmart Literacy, as well as one of her inspirations, Talmadge (or Tammy) Steele. They’ll share their vision for community outreach and parent education and the ways that PlaySmart Literacy makes supporting child development accessible for every family. In the next episode, Episode 75, I’ll be talking again with Michelle and also with some of her team. I hope that you’ll join me there as well to hear more about how this program works, but also to hear the passion that fuels the people behind this amazing movement and to hear the ways that it has literally changed lives…

Let’s jump in. Well, Michelle and Tammy, I am so excited to talk with you today and just thrilled with what you’re sharing. So I want to start off by hearing a little bit about your own paths that have brought you to serve young children and families.

Michelle Dineen-White: Sure. So, I started PlaySmart Literacy nine years ago now. I’d been an educator for over 20 years, and really just saw a gap, something that was missing in the environment. I was working at a family literacy center and the families that were the most vulnerable had the most trouble coming, or coming with regularity, and really being an active part of what was going on there, and so I just kind of evolved this idea. So it’s early literacy and family engagement outreach, and completely mobile and free, and we reach families online and in person, and it has really evolved from there.

The way that I met Tammy, who is such an important part of my work, I was giving a talk on dialogic reading, which is just education speak for talk and play, and afterwards, and she told me about her book that she had written, The Gift of Words, and conversation starters for how to talk to your young child, and I just loved it. It was very visual and very practical and an amazing meld of science and how to, and I went home and we met soon after for lunch. I looked her up and found a picture of her on her website and it was Tammy at a picnic table outside with a bunch of women and talking about her book. And after I read the caption and saw that she was sharing her work with women at a rehab center, and I was just in love with this woman. Everything that she did I’m like, "This is everything I want to be in my own life." She’s so generous with her work and allowing us at PlaySmart to really make it foundational in what we want to do. From day one, she has got it, she understands what we want to do. We have a kind of shared vision.

Tammy Steele: Part of our shared vision was that parents are really, really, really important. I grew up in Arkansas and I was the oldest of six children and my mother didn’t have a college degree but she loved talking to children, and I remember asking her, "How did children learn to talk?" And she said, "Well, it’s a miracle." And that’s about where the state of the science was. We didn’t know anything, but now between computers, and COVID, and research, brain scans, we now know that some of the things that my mother was doing were right, and children learn best from the person they love the most and they have the best time with, and that’s their mom usually, so I was into moms and empowering them to know the power of what they were doing. My mother just thought it was miraculous, but it wasn’t, and she had three kids that got PhDs.

Michelle Dineen-White: Tammy’s been an awesome link to bringing that really strong science and making it digestible for families and caregivers (I call them family leaders, anyone who has a small child in their life) and making that really accessible for them to recognize their powerful role in making that connection between talk, play, and learning for their small child.

With Tammy’s second book it’s between talk, play, and math learning. She does that in really concrete ways. So that basic message, about taking that strong science and wrapping it in the warmth of your own play at home, is what we have worked together hard on. That’s what we’re always hard at work on. How can we do that better all the time?

To continue reading or listening, see Episode 74 and Episode 75 of the Not Just Cute podcast, released June 8, 2024.

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