My BS is in Early Childhood Education. I spent years teaching in Early Childhood Ed - grades 1-3, preschool, and I subbed in K-2 classrooms for years. I adore the age group, and the enthusiasm and energy that these little kids have for learning and for love.
Children learn best through play. Let me repeat this for you - Children learn best through play.
Not rote memorization. Not structured learning "games". PLAY. Watch a young child in a sandbox with some sand toy that has wheels and gizmos, and check out the concentration involved as they workout how the sand falls to the ground and how the wheels turn. Give them enough gizmos and toys to work with in the sandbox, and they will figure out how everything from gravity to gears work.
When I was searching for preschools for my own children, I remember searching for schools that had a play based curriculum. I was more interested in them learning how to work and play well with others, and being given free time to explore age appropriate toys than I was with them learning how to read. I made them play for an hour when they came home from school, and I limited the amount of screen time they had. No more than 2 hours of television a day - and some days, we didn't even watch that much. I don't know how well my theories played out, but my kids are well adjusted, one is in graduate school, and two are in college. All received academic scholarships, and none of them were reading Harry Potter while still in kindergarten.
Sadly, we have been moving away from play in our classrooms. The trend has been towards forcing children to learn the alphabet and pushing them to read at younger and younger ages. The last year that I worked as a substitute teacher, which was 2 years ago - things had changed drastically. I subbed in a kindergarten classroom the second week of school, and the teacher told me how worried she was for the kids. They were to know all 26 letters of the alphabet - upper and lower case, all the colors, all the shapes, and all the numbers through 20 - before the end of September. Now most kids are ready for this, but not all. They were supposed to have their first hundred words memorized and be able to recognize them in content before Thanksgiving. Again, many kids are ready for this, but not all. Back when I was learning how to teach - 25 years ago - we let kindergartners play with letters, numbers, and shapes. We let them explore their relationships with each other. We played with pattern recognition. Dear God, did we play with pattern recognition - using shapes, colors, and letters, we worked on pattern recognition. We worked on fine motor skills - you know, your finger pincher grasp that you use to hold a pencil? We worked on number theory. Not only did the kids know the numbers, we were to make certain that three rocks = 3 = THREE. We made certain that they understood that 3 was more than 1. We let them play with manipulatives so that they could get a grasp of the concept of number. We'd work on one to one correspondence. Do we have enough toy cars for all of the dinosaurs to ride out to the playground in? Let's see!!! Nowadays, kids are adding and subtracting well before the end of kindergarten, but I'm not sure they understand why they need to know.
And where has this gotten us?
ADHD rates nationally are through the roof. Five year old children are being asked to sit still and learn for 45 minutes or more at a time without a break. Developmentally, five year olds are just not capable of sitting still for that long. Recess and naptime have been removed from the curriculum in the name of "test scores".
Anxiety and other stress related disorders are on the rise as our children are being pushed harder and harder to perform better. Play, imagination, and free time have been wiped out of the school. It doesn't help that parents are structuring their kids after school free time so that kids have no chance - no chance at all - to decompress from the stress of the day and let their minds take in what they have learned.
European countries - countries that stress play and don't begin to teach reading to their students until they are 8 years old - are performing better on standardized test scores across the board. They have recess in their schools. Vibrant music and arts programs. Physical Education. And across the board, these kids are performing better than our kids. Do you see the disconnect? As we push our kids down some dystopian road tied in with higher test scores, we are losing touch with the most valuable resource of all - the imagination. The imagination that can take a seemingly impossible problem, work outside of the lines, and find a workable solution. We are drilling that imagination, that love of play, and enjoyment of discovery and figuring out how things work in the name of test scores.
I read a disturbing thought recently that I want to share here.
Do you remember the Apollo 13 Mission? The lunar module broke. The astronauts were facing the very real possibility that they were going to die - adrift and alone in the orbit of the moon. NASA engineers were given a box containing everything that was available in the module and told to find a solution.
Find a solution they did. Working hard against a clock with minimal supplies and the knowledge that death was the result of failure, they came up with a wildly imaginative solution that brought all of the astronauts safely back home.
There is doubt that our youngest crop of engineers and scientists have the kind of imagination now that would enable them to pull off the same miracle in the same situation.
It's frightening when you realize that those "old" engineers worked with nothing more than slide rules, and had played outdoors at recess throughout elementary school, were not over-scheduled on weekends and in the evenings, and had grown up without computers, smart phones, or video games.
What are we doing to ourselves?
The resources I used for this piece can be found here:
More Students Entering School Without Fine Motor Skills
How Schools Ruined Recess - And 4 Ways to Fix It
A NYC Teacher Breaks Silence on the Power of Play
Harnessing the Incredible Learning Potential of the Adolescent Brain
School Accountability Without Standardized Testing
Kindergartners Get Little Time to Play. Why Does it Matter?
Students Who Use Digital Devices in Class Perform Worse in Exams
There's nothing more frugal than growing your own, is there? One of my goals for the year was to get my vegetable garden back up and running. Unfortunately, with the ground as cold and wet as it has been this spring, I haven't been able to get anything into the ground. (We actually had frost Tuesday morning - two weeks AFTER the last frost date for our area.) So, enter my Pot Garden! I have planted the herbs I rely on most heavily in my kitchen in here. Thyme, Oregano, Dill, Rosemary, Cilantro, Basil, and Chives are planted in the big pot. Not only can I use the herbs from the pot throughout the summer, I can pick and dry herbs and save them for use during the rest of the year. In the little pot next to the big one, we've got some Lavender growing. We like to pick the buds and make tea with it, and dry it to make sachets to put in with our clothes to make them smell better than any dryer sheet ever could. Off to the left of the pot you can see my Black Eyed Susans - they are literally growing like weeds - and off to the right, you can see the weeds. Technically, they're violets, and I love the pretty purple flowers they produce, so I don't pull them. They're "ambiance".
