Kindergarten crunch: Lack of playtime killing joy of learning, say advocates
By Kirsten Stewart
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake TribuneUpdated:08/24/2009 07:51:05 AM MDT
Fresh from recess, a gaggle of 5-year-olds crowd teacher Betsy Haslam's classroom, grab blankets from their "cubbies" and cuddle into a spot on the carpeted floor.
Haslam turns down the lights and within minutes, several of the children fall asleep. Two remain that way through song time.
"It's still summer. They're up late and it's initially hard for their little bodies to adjust," said Haslam, who starts the kindergarten year at Whittier Elementary with naps, snacks and playtime, but does less of it as the year goes on. "We have the state standards to teach."
Child development experts have long bemoaned the structured, test-driven course of early education. But a national push for universal kindergarten and preschool has raised the stakes.
School administrators are now pressed to show these public programs are a worthwhile investment. That means teaching and testing literacy and math skills.
"Doubling time in kindergarten should mean twice the time for instruction," said Reed Spencer, a curriculum coordinator at the state office of education who is designing a uniform testing tool for Utah's full-day kindergarten programs.
Child advocates, though, worry play, exercise and exploration in most public kindergartens is vanishing.
Authors of a 2009 report, "Crisis in the Kindergarten" call the current state of affairs, "a national disgrace." They call for return to play-based teaching, warning the nation is "blindly pursuing educational policies that could well damage the intellectual, social and physical development of an entire generation."
Classic play materials like blocks, sand and water tables, and props for dramatic play have largely disappeared, say Alliance researcher who surveyed 268 full-day kindergartens in New York City and Los Angeles.
On a typical day, kids in those programs spend three hours learning to read and do math, compared to 30 minutes of free play, the study shows. In many kindergarten classrooms there is no playtime. And standardized tests are now routine.
"It's a shame," said the study's co-author and Alliance program director Edward Miller. "Play is easily derided as a waste of time, but young children work hard at it, inventing scenes and stories and solving problems."
Miller said numerous studies show kids who engage in complex socio-dramatic play develop higher levels of thinking, stronger language and social skills and more empathy and imagination than children who don't. Play also lowers stress.
Yet curriculum designers continue to peddle phonics and other discreet skills, partly because they're easier to measure, said Miller, stressing he isn't advocating a free-for-all.
The best teachers strive for a healthy balance of child-initiated play and teacher-guided, hands-on learning, said Miller. "You want to satisfy a child's hunger for knowledge. But the age when children become naturally excited about reading varies. Some kids are that way at 3 or 4. Others have no interest until they're 6 or 7."
In her eight years of teaching kindergarten, Haslam has seen play lose favor with parents and administrators. She strives for balance in her classroom and wishes there were more hours in the day.
Her students get three 15-minute recess breaks in a six-hour day and at least 10 minutes with a kitchen playset, blocks, Legos and other toys.
Even during more scripted "table time," students pick from a host of activities designed to improve their cognitive skills. The idea is to seize upon a child's intrinsic motivation to learn, said Haslam. "Play is important, it's the way kids socialize and figure out life and how things work."
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