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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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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Let’s Take a Poetry Break
Please check out these 2 exceptional poems written and performed by Sayda Morales a graduate of the first Kipp Charter School in the Bronx. Listen for her tribute to Kipp, “I am from a team and a family helping me climb the mountain to college”. It is our wish that Valley Charter School will be that team, that community, for the young people we are entrusted to teach.
Click Here for “I Am From”
Click Here for “Para Ti, Mi Hija” (“For you, my daughter”)
Emotional Training Helps Kids Fight Depression
Evidence is building around the importance of supporting the emotional development of school age children. Check out this NPR piece by Allison Aubrey. In it she explores resilience training in the Middle School years. It appears that helping kids stay positive and focused in an emotionally charged moment not only improves coping skills, it diminishes their chances of becoming depressed by about 50%.
“If a person tends to see small disappointments as catastrophes or failures, they can become depressed or anxious. It’s a common trick our minds can play on us, as children and as adults. But once thoughts are more aligned with reality, emotional responses can change for the better.”
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.”
Life's Best Lessons are Outside the Classroom
This article by Daniel Fireside is a terrific endorsement of experience-based education. Many of Valley Charter School’s key pillars are demonstrated here: the impact of experience-based education, the relevance of service learning and community, the importance of the development of critical thinking skills.
“With roots in environmental education, service learning, and the ideas of radical educators John Dewey and Paulo Freire, place-based education extends the learning environment beyond the classroom into the rest of the world, and invites the community to get involved as mentors. Parents are also encouraged to be part of the process, increasing their connection to the school and commitment to their children’s active involvement.”
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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