Kindergarten Playtime Disappears, Raising Alarm on Children's Learning and Hea... - The Diigo Meta page

• 28 May 09
  

  mrs robeson

  Article discusses need for playtime, etc

  Assess_Curriculum EarlyChildhood

• 

  A Strang

  kindergarten playtime health learning

• 

  Steve Ransom

  New studies show play losing out to formal lessons and tests, even though multiple benefits of imaginative play are well documented

  childhood kindergarten learning

  • In many kindergarten classrooms there is no playtime at all. Teachers say the curriculum does not incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it.
  • “We have had a politically and commercially driven effort to make kindergarten a one-size-smaller first grade. Why in the world are we trying to teach the elementary curriculum at the early childhood level?”
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • Finnish children similarly have a lengthy and playful childhood, not beginning formal schooling until age 7. Yet Finland consistently gets the highest scores on international exams.
    • Crisis in the Kindergarten describes the current state of public kindergartens in the U.S. as “a national disgrace.”
• 27 May 09
  

  Melinda Waffle

  education research kindergarten teaching

  • the use of most such tests with children under age eight is scientifically invalid
  • the curriculum does not incorporate play, there isn’t time for it, and many school administrators do not value it
  • 2 more annotations...
  • • “These practices, which are not well grounded in research, violate long-established principles of child development and good teaching,”
    • six recommendations for education policymakers, school administrators, teachers, and parents
• 26 May 09
  

  Karen Koehn
  • “It is increasingly clear that they are compromising both children’s
    health and their long-term prospects for success in school.”
  • children who engage in complex socio-dramatic play develop higher levels of
    thinking, stronger language skills, better social skills, more empathy, and more
    imagination than children who do not play in this way.
• 25 May 09
  

  Will Richardson

  Child development experts have been raising alarms about the increasingly didactic, test-driven, and joyless course of early childhood education. “These practices, which are not well grounded in research, violate long-established principles of child development and good teaching,” states the Alliance’s report. “It is increasingly clear that they are compromising both children’s health and their long-term prospects for success in school.”
  
  Numerous studies have shown that children who engage in complex socio-dramatic play develop higher levels of thinking, stronger language skills, better social skills, more empathy, and more imagination than children who do not play in this way. They are also less aggressive and show more self-control. Play also lowers stress levels in children.
  
  Nevertheless, child-driven play has fallen out of favor in the U.S. Many people believe that kindergartners need to settle down and engage in serious learning. They see play as a waste of time, or worse, a descent into chaos.

  testing kids parent_book

  • The authors of Crisis in the Kindergarten, Alliance directors Edward Miller and Joan Almon, argue that the disappearance of kindergarten play is part of a larger societal problem. “Play is one of the vital signs of health in children,” they write. “We do not know the long-term consequences of the loss of play in early childhood, but this has become a concern for pediatricians and psychologists.”

    
    

    They report evidence of significant increases in behavioral problems and school failure among kindergartners. They question unrealistic standards that are developmentally beyond many young children, forcing teachers to spend long hours trying to meet them, and leading to the wrongful labeling of normal child behavior and learning patterns as “misbehavior, attention disorders, or learning disabilities.”

• 22 May 09
  

  Clay Burell

  research pre-k standardizedtests

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