Susan Ochshorn, a specialist in early childhood education, demonstrates in this post (as she has before, and will again) that play is crucial for the healthy mental development of young children. Ochshorn is the founder of ECE Policyworks and a tireless advocate for childhood.
Ochshorn cites the research of Deborah Leong to explain the importance of play.
“Self-regulation, as the non-neuroscientists among us refer to executive function, has to do with the development of the prefrontal cortex, and influences both cognition and emotions. Leong compares this “muscle,” which grows exponentially in the years from birth to five, to a traffic controller, allocating mental resources to focus on the tasks at hand. Here are the three components of executive function:
Inhibitory self-control, which allows children to delay gratification, and to stay on task, even when they’re bored;
Working memory, which enables kids to take multiple perspectives and hold two strategies in mind at the same time; and
Cognitive flexibility, or the ability to adjust mental effort depending upon the task, and to pay attention when the task is challenging.
And here’s why it matters: Levels of executive function have been found to predict academic success better than IQ and social class. Moreover, self-regulation correlates with acquisition of literacy skills, improved teacher-child interactions, and relationships with other children. Emotional regulation is also linked to a child’s ability to control stress while learning. Unregulated children just can’t get down to the important business at hand, and they are becoming alarming statistics. Today, one out of 40 preschoolers is expelled, or three times the rate of K-12 expulsions. Class size, teacher-child ratios, duration of day, teacher credentials and education levels, as well as teacher stress have all been implicated in this growing phenomenon. Early childhood mental health consultation is increasingly seen—and indeed, welcome—as a viable strategy for changing this calculus. But it’s not enough.”
In short, children need to play, and our test-obsessed education system is reducing the available for play. This is not good for children or for the mental health of our troubled society.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
From the article: “We can’t turn back the clock, concedes Leong, to a time when play ruled and kindergarten was not, alas, first grade.”
Why not? Let’s beware of falling into the TINA (there is no alternative) mindset of the neoliberal “reformers”. If we truly want the best for our children, turning kindergarten back into kindergarten is perhaps the best place to start.
We MUST “turn back the clock.”
Well said Dienne.
The only “forward” direction on a clock points toward the increase in total entropy in a system undergoing spontaneous change. I’m so afraid that’s going to go over people’s heads.
The lock-step death march toward inhumanity, proposed as inevitable by profit-driven technocrats, isn’t a a feature of technical progress at all. It comes from their unchecked power as they pursue ever greater control of human resources. Yes, there’s an alternative, and it lies first in populist political power.
“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
-C.S. Lewis
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
“children need to play”
As a high school teacher, I continue to teach Sendak’s WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE, since it is a great lesson in self-regulation. With older students, we should also teach breathing exercises–if you can control your breath, you can control your thoughts; if you can control your thoughts, you can control your behavior. “Play” is too important to be limited to the primary grades. Thanks for another great post.
““Play” is too important to be limited to the primary grades.”
Amen and hallelujah!
Or to any age!!
Agree with Dienne and Duane. Let’s get our hands on the hour and minute hands of Kindergartens all over the USA and after that, we can do the same to the PreK’s. Everyone here knows that since ours is not a socially nor economically leveled playing field, the Plutocrats know for certain how Executive Function develops. The gravy train is designed to flow in only one direction and that is not into the hood, the hollers or the barrios.
Hands Up
Hands On
Hand Us Back Our Early Childhood!
I’m with you too — just include my little first graders, please! Letting these 6 year olds have a little bit of playtime is my greatest challenge now with state and district monitors constantly coming through with their Danielson checklists and frowning faces. Danielson did not include play or humanity or joy in her vaunted rubrics of teacher destruction so they are now taboo under all circumstances.
Give them play time, Chris, don’t destroy your own humanity.
Duane, I sneak it in every chance I get. We also capture insects and reptiles and study them, sketch them, and research them before releasing them. All verboten under our new top-down, micromanaged curriculum.
“. . . the hood, the hollers or the barrios.”
Another quote for quip of the year. TAGO!
agreed. awesome
Play is also critical for imagination and creativity, which some seem intent on eliminating entirely from the American psyche.
As Albert Einstein said “Play is the highest form of research.”
But what did he know? He was just a crazy guy with some very warped ideas about reality (especially about space and time)
I often reflect back to my student teaching days in Kindergarten during the 70’s. What a busy and wonderful place for 5 year olds to explore group settings, begin to demonstrate independence and learn to love learning. What a difference the current climate is now with the obsession with data. Children push back with negative behavior in classrooms. They are expected to do what our we did in first or second grade. Have humans really evolved so much that we can say this is appropriate?
Here is a bold new idea. How about we ADD years to a basic educational career? How about middle school encompassing grades 6-9 and high schools 10-13? We claim that knowledge has doubled in the last 40 years, but we have done nothing to create a way for students to assimilate information unless we use the “pushdown to lower grades” method. Of course it would cost more $$, but realizing life spans are longer, our children will be adults and earn longer than we did.
Amen….. you cannot expect children to grow up if you do not let them have a childhood.
I would suggest that play is just as important for adults and for all the same reasons.
Places like Google and Apple give their employees recess, time to play. Some of our best thinking happens when we are not at our desks.
Could not agree with you more! Creative process is not turned on because “someone says so” or because it is in the “independent activity” of a teacher’s regimented lesson plan at a very specific time within a lesson….. just doesn’t work that way. But if Gates says it does.. and PR pays for his message.. THEN IT DOES????? I will dislodge tongue from cheek now!
Dare I say it.. WE ALL NEED TO PLAY as we are members of the human race. Half of the fifth and sixth grade behaviors in elementary schools could be avoided it the students WERE JUST ALLOWED TO PLAY and take a break during the day. Not to mention rest breaks or play would help them learn important social skills and group behavior. A student who is physically and mentally happy is a lot more apt to be able and ready to learn. But who am I to say this… I am but a “lowly” teacher “without a clue” according to 6 figure bureaucrats whose pencils are pushing a lot of top-down garbage at us these days. I want to have time to play too but must jump through a lot of bureaucratic hoops designed to supposedly make me “accountable”. In fact all the hoops I and fellow teachers are jumping through give us less time to prepare for the actual business of teaching while at the same time giving us no time for relaxation or play in our own lives. Wonder what trips the Gates family took this summer? What trips the Duncan family went on this summer? We already know where the Obama’s went.
“But who am I to say this… I am but a “lowly” teacher “without a clue” according to 6 figure bureaucrats whose pencils are pushing a lot of top-down garbage at us these days.”
There’s a reason that the pencils they are using for that pushing are #2 . . .
The “lowly teacher” quip caught my eye also. I always say, “Why would they listen to an old fart Spanish teacher?”
Executive Functions are critical for all of us in everything we do in life. When children struggle in school, the issues are often related to Executive Functions. A broad category of skills, but schools spend hours, a list of controlling rules, little time to change classes, limited locker times,plan ahead which notebooks to take for two classes, no time to look at hallway displays, organize notebooks, no room to relate to peers, no restroom time, herding children, yelling at them to hurry, don’t be late, lock-step classroom organization, flow-chart assignment turn-in, HURRY! Eyes forward, never off task, no THINK TIME, HURRY!
Every second in most of our schools is controlled and scheduled. On the surface, these schools look well organized and students are well behaved. Visitors are impressed and if the floors are shiny, BINGO!
EXTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL! Administrators would never think of imitating Finnish schools because they fear chaos if children had breaks after class, social interactions determined by children, especially in urban schools. Scared to death of children acting like children.
This US EXECUTIVE FUNCTION Waste Land leaves many children on their own, if they cannot handle such control – 100% rat race. Or, other children need parents, private tutors, and/or consultants to help them survive in these slaughter house squeeze boxes. Bit dramatic?
Have you worked with autistic students who let us know how this impacts their psyche?Worked with parents of children with Autism where many of those skills may never develop, but a committee has to disect the Executive Functioning skills, task by task, to just make it through one period, let alone an entire school day?
As parents, this rat race starts early with getting children ready for school. Rat race after school and hours of homework, little family time, no down time…we talk about teaching responsibility…all connected to choking the life out of childhood and doing Zip for developing Executive Functioning skills. Are we ready for out of control college life?
CCSS & #ToxicTests fall right in line with all of the above. Lock step!
Don’t the best schools in Finland and Japan have recess? Four and five times a day?
Why is America so myopic? Why can’t we learn from others? Why do we think that everything we do is “the only way”?
I don’t think I could bring myself to teach at an elementary school that didn’t have recess.
Yes, Other nations have recess. It is especially important in Finland, where children get a break between classes for outdoor play.
I often think about this, Diane. Kids come into my last period class after 4 minutes of passing time, and it’s unnatural. I often have them stand and stretch and “shake it out” and then close their eyes for a bit and breathe slowly, deeply. I can get away with this in my speech and theater classes, but I recommend it to others as well.
Imagine doing what they do in middle and high school–going from one class to another, for hours, with no real break between. If we adults were forced to do that, we would revolt.
It’s important for those who organize school and work schedules to understand how the organism works–what’s necessary for its optimal functioning.
Excellent idea, Bob! I’m going to steal this for my classes as well (especially my end of the day debate class). With your permission, of course.
Agreed, Bob! I do Brain Gym and also have several CDs of music on my classroom laptop so we do kid-friendly aerobic exercises and just plain silly dances and fun stuff several times a day.
An absolute must for 1st graders who are now expected to sit through 3 reading blocks a day totaling 170 minutes and a math block totaling 70 minutes.
Talk about unnatural!
We breathe and stretch and laugh a sing lots and lots through the day, despite the warning not to be caught ‘wasting’ learning time that way when the state and district anti-childhood inquisitors are doing walk-throughs.
“Today, one out of 40 preschoolers is expelled, or three times the rate of K-12 expulsions. Class size, teacher-child ratios, duration of day, teacher credentials and education levels, as well as teacher stress have all been implicated in this growing phenomenon.”
No mention of parenting, including stress and how they deal with it; working parents and fickle, expensive daycare; whether kids only get attention by doing whatever it takes at home and anywhere else. Then the little ones come into a social context where “you have to learn to take turns” and screaming doesn’t work, and much of the agenda for learning is set by getting ready for real school where this generation will be launched on that idiotic college and career trajectory–advancing through “learning progressions” that deny them opportunities to dwell on what interests them. That is a waste of time if you are in a race.
Feds are likely to address “the expulsion problem” by requiring a test-based admission to pre-school. It is likely to be the marshmallow test or something comparable for the sweet-averse. This test is a fairly low-cost way to check for “executive function,” viewed as a capacity for delayed gratification, the precursor of grit. The truncated view of executive function will prevail because it is cheap and easy. Sorry for the cynicism, but not caring about the social contexts that produce the phenomenon of expelling kids–preschool or other wise–is all too typical in today’s world of policy making.
If you don’t know about the marshmallow test, just key-word the phrase on your search engine .
Thank you, Laura! This is what happens when psychopathology becomes policy.
Thank you for this important post! Play is essential. God save us from a world of the kind run by people who have grown up in a system that devalues play and promotes, from the youngest ages, competition for external rewards.
I said to my theater students at the beginning of this year, “When people ask you what you do in Mr. Shepherd’s class, I want you to tell them, ‘In that class, we do really, really serious stuff: We play.'”
Via play, children learn how the world works. Pile the blocks too high, and they all fall down. But that’s just the beginning of why play is important.
Play tames and socializes us. Via play we refine the theory of mind with which we are born and learn the intricacies of dealing fairly with one another. Empathy is inborn in us, but if not nurtured, it dies. Our basic ontological situation is that your mind is over there, and mine is over here, and there is this gap between us, and our task here on this planet is to bridge that gap, to communicate across it. Via play, we learn how to do that. We learn about the similarities and variations among others and ourselves and how to negotiate those. All our organizations, at all levels, from the family to the company to the state, depend upon the quality of this early learning for their proper functioning.
And among the means we have developed for bridging that gap between ourselves and others, one of the most important is the kind of play that we call art. We create to communicate across the ontological gap: language, stories, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, dance, . . .
Play exercises the imagination. By means of play, we make discoveries. We innovate. We forge the future. Art is play. But so is science.
And the best of us, via play , RE-CREATE OURSELVES continually. If we are healthy psychologically, we are the locus of control in our own lives. We are not passive recipients of the slings and arrows of fortune. We are not passive victims of our constitutions and circumstances. We imagine ourselves different than we are, we try on variations of our existing selves, and via that play of our imaginations, in which we re-create ourselves, we grow. A healthy personal identity is not a given. It is not fated. It is not predetermined. It is a creation. And that creation comes about via play. In other words, recreation can be re-creation of the Self.
But there’s more.
According to Hindu tradition, the lovely Radha and her friends hear, one night, the sound of Krishna’s flute. They go to investigate. Entranced by the music, they dance with Krishna. That dance is called the rasa lila. “Rasa” means, literally, “sweetness, nectar, honey.” “Lila” means, literally, “play.” The dance of Krishna and the cow herd girls, the gopis, is the dance of the universe itself, which is divine play–sweet, sweet play in the mind of the One.
We could take that approach to our lives.
Or we could cancel recess so that kids can stay inside and prepare to answer EBSR questions on standard CCSS.Literacy.ELA.4.666.3b.
Get serious about this living.
Let your living be for joy.
Dance through your life.
Play.
Great stuff.
If you don’t mind my encapsulating it:
“Seize the Play”
Art is play and so is science.
Seize the play, with great defiance!
Life is meant for play and laughing
Not for taking tests and graphing
What a delight it is to read these posts! In this time in which teachers are so devalued by our policymakers, there are millions of empathetic, wise, hardworking, dedicated people like those who have posted here who grok what childhood is all about. Thank you all. You give me hope.
Our district has mandated recess in elementary schools. I think lower grades have at least two a day with the larger time occurring at the lunch hour. These had been slowly disappearing as principals locked in any kind of free time in schedules to more time spent working on reading. This lack of recess time often fell upon those kids who needed it the most. Those kids who were on the bubble of not passing the spring tests!
What kids need is playtime without adults directing & managing everything they do! They need to practice negotiating, organizing, turn taking & problem solving on their own. Free play allows kids this opportunity. I smiled to myself the other day when I looked out the window of my speech room & saw a group of kindergarteners playing Duck, Duck, Goose all by themselves at recess.
Kindergarten (Children’s Garden)? Nein.
Kinderfabrik (Children’s Factory)? Ja.
“The play’s the thing, wherein we’ll grab ahold of golden ring.” — DAMlet
Reblogged this on Kmareka.com and commented:
Social Worker’s orders: take time to play today and every day.
Maybe it’s the name PLAY that causes some of the policy makers to think it is bad…bad…bad! With their primitive thinking, learning can’t be joyful, interesting, or fun, since that would be a waste of time, so it must be PUNISHMENT!
Maybe we need to rebrand play with a new name, like the deformers are trying to rebrand Common Core. What would be a new name for play? How about “spontaneous creative cognition processing?
Maybe art teachers could call it ‘watercolorboarding” or “Chalk and Awe”
That should get the support of the Dick Cheney types, at least.
At the end of most history units, I give my seventh graders a few days to make a comic, story or skit about what they’ve learned. The skit kids are clearly playing. They grab costumes and props, run around and pretend to be Mongols and Chinese farmers. It’s play enriched by content from the history curriculum. The comics and stories are mental play. I do not burden the kids with a rubric –I simply say show at least twenty facts you learned in the unit super-clearly.
Awesome. Such activities–and the learning that informs them–is remembered forever–long, long after much of what happened in school is lost.
When we have scholarly information from child development experts who testify to the developmental needs of children that are being violated in the Common Core environment, why are we not filing mass class actions suits? This is abuse and neglect folks. This is causing an epidemic of mental and physical health issues that will only get worse as the children get older. Is this the corporate goal? To enhance the pharma educational industrial complex? Is this “supply and demand” for Pearson getting into the psychiatric drug business?
“Inhibitory self-control, which allows children to delay gratification, and to stay on task, even when they’re bored;
Working memory, which enables kids to take multiple perspectives and hold two strategies in mind at the same time; and
Cognitive flexibility, or the ability to adjust mental effort depending upon the task, and to pay attention when the task is challenging.”
Walk into any Montessori classroom and this is what you will find. Children learn self-discipline, self-control, concentration and cognitive flexibility through the “work” they choose in the classroom. For Montessori kids, “work” in the classroom is their form of play for their developing brains. For more on the neuroscience behind Montessori, there is a great video of Dr. Stephen Hughes discussing it: http://vimeo.com/9994321
Public Montessori is gaining ground across the country and I hope we can get more people to pay attention to it! Let’s get rid of Common Core, teaching to the test and high-stakes testing. When will our government start educating children based on scientific principles of human development rather than test scores and the greed of charter chains and corporations? More Montessori!
I absolutely agree with everything you said. The toxic environment that has been created by CCSS is the absolute opposite of a joyful authentic learning environment. I too hope that Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and developmentally “healthy” learning environments that serve children’s holistic needs will come about via public outrage from this abuse that has been perpetuated by CCSS..