Reading at Some Private Schools Is Delayed
When I was looking at preschools for my daughter, I was torn between my roots as a progressive educator – a person who firmly trusts in the development of children and the need to educate and nurture the whole child – and pressures to seek out a school that would “maximize my child’s potential”. Looking back, I realize that the single most important thing anyone said to me back then was, “What’s so great about knowing how to read when you’re three!” This article echoes with the conflicts parents go through when trying to do what’s right for their children and get them educated too. These conflicts get more and more pronounced as children get older, the stakes get higher, and our culture of testing frenzy becomes louder and more pervasive.
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(Click here to read our previous post: The Test Chinese Schools Still Fail!)
Want to get your kids into college? Let them play
Wow! Stop the presses! This headline says it all. Erika Christakis and Nicholas Christakis are Masters of one of Harvard’s residential houses. They see a distinct difference between students with a play-based preschool and early childhood background and those from “drill and kill” schools. Not only do they feel play is critical to the development of young children, they “wonder why play is not encouraged in educational periods later in the developmental life of young people — giving kids more practice as they get closer to the ages of our students.”
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The Ruinous Culture We’ve Created in Elementary Schools
Shaun Johnson makes a clear stand on the testing culture that pervades our school system:
“Throughout January and beyond, social studies, science, and other expendable subjects stop. That’s right, they stop, for months at a time. Schools become mobilized as math and reading academies. And no, it’s not this idealized culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity; students are not reading and discussing literature of their choosing or building mathematical models to simulate concepts.”
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Talking Numbers Counts For Kids’ Math Skills
This article/interview from NPR may be talking about preschoolers, but at it’s heart, it’s a great endorsement of experience-based education. When children learn by rote memorization, they are not learning the deeper meanings and qualities of the material – whether it’s numbers or ABC’s. They may learn to read, for example, but without making connections to their own lives and the world around them their ability to really understand what they are reading is deeply limited.
University of Chicago psychology professor Susan Levine finds that “for children to develop the math skills they’ll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples — instead of just repeating them out loud.”
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The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers
How much is a great Kindergarten teacher worth? $320,000.00 per year. David Leonhardt of the New York Times Economic Scene writes about a unique study that is changing the way the world looks at early childhood education.
“Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.”
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Playing to Learn
The New York Times’ Susan Engel envisions a world where children learn by doing and are given ample time to master the critical skills they need through activities that are relevant. Engel asks us to: “Imagine, for instance, a third-grade classroom that was free of the laundry list of goals currently harnessing our teachers and students, and that was devoted instead to just a few narrowly defined and deeply focused goals.”
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School Adds Weeding to Reading and Writing
As with all educational topics, school gardens have been the subject of hot debate lately. This article by Kim Severson in the New York Times Dining section, outlines the debate and details the plans for the latest Edible Schoolyard backed by California’s Alice Waters. For those who don’t know, Alice Waters has been a huge champion of the idea that fresh, good food is a right, not a privilege. In many circles she is credited with the increased availability of organic foods in our local markets. The school garden at P.S. 216 in Brooklyn will be the sixth backed by Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation.
“Teachers will use the garden to give students — 460 children from prekindergarten to the fifth grade — lessons in subjects like art, math, history and science. Administrators hope the school will eventually become a center for the study of the environment and agriculture.”
The playtime’s the thing
Now there is more evidence that a play-based approach to preschool and early childhood education is the way to go. We know from the first post in this blog that imaginative and open-ended play supports language development, cognition, and the development of self-control and self-regulation in a social setting. (Self-regulation is strongly correlated with success later in life.) This article from the Washington Post’s Emma Brown finds that early, play-based education also sustains and strengthens children in their emotional growth.
“Research has shown that by 23, people who attended play-based preschools were eight times less likely to need treatment for emotional disturbances than those who went to preschools where direct instruction prevailed. Graduates of the play-based preschools were three times less likely to be arrested for committing a felony.”
Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?
Check out this great article by Paul Tough about the benefits of play-based education in the early years!
Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among scholars and scientists who study early-childhood development, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the boardroom than the classroom: executive function. Originally a neuroscience term, it refers to the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recently, cognitive psychologists have come to believe that executive function, and specifically the skill of self-regulation, might hold the answers to some of the most vexing questions in education today.
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