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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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.”
If You Give a Kid a Shovel
In this joyful article, Joe Gillespie highlights some of the benefits of having a school garden. At Valley Charter School it is our goal to establish an edible schoolyard – an organic vegetable garden – that students will, in large part, create, plant, harvest, and maintain. One of the benefits of having an edible schoolyard is that, once up and running, it becomes a vehicle for teaching math and science concepts as well as the fundamentals of nutrition education. One of the surprise benefits: gardening requires patience. See our previous post “Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Control?” to get a sense of how important this is.
“Every day is a little different and always very hands-on. I have found something very interesting about teaching gardening over the years. There is usually no immediate gratification, which is what students are used to and what they desire. Other than seeing a radish seed pop out of the soil fairly quickly, most plants take two to three months to grow to a harvestable size. And there is all of the weeding and watering to do. Yet the reward is often so great, that if you can just get them that far, the concepts they learn are deeply ingrained in their being.”
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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