"You're More of a Joke-y Teacher"

I've sent hundreds of kids off into the world from the Woodland Park Cooperative School. For most of them, I was their first and only teacher, which meant that, for better or worse, I'd had both the responsibility and opportunity to shape children's expectations for what's to come. Some of that was conscious, like our curriculum of questioning authority, but most was just an unconscious manifestation of my personality and the pedagogy I've been developing over decades.

I often say that after my wife and daughter, all of my best friends are five-years-old. After all, these are the people with whom I've been hanging out, daily, for the better part of three years. We'd been together through highs and lows, made life stories together, shared inside jokes, and trusted one another: the stuff from which best friends are made. That said, I know the friendship will fade, at least from their side, once they've moved on, but I hope the feeling of that relationship stays with them as they encounter their future teachers. 

Few things gratify me more than when alumni return to visit and enthuse about the wonders of their new teacher, and most of them do, even sometimes telling me that they like their new teacher "better." It doesn't hurt because I know that this new relationship is built upon the one we had. Naturally, I want them to like their current teacher. By the same token, there are few things that hurt more than when one of these children tell me they don't like their new teacher or, worse, that they wish they could return to preschool.

The whole subject is bitter sweet, of course, and my feelings would be just the opposite were I being told these things by their parent, but it's a central part of every teacher's job (or should be) to provide an experience for children that is right for them right now. I try to do that when the children are preschoolers and that's all I can do. When I speak with children who have moved on, that moment has passed for us. It's now someone else's job to provide that "just right" experience and if they're doing it right, they've earned the title "favorite."

One summer a former "best friend" enrolled in our summer session. As we were re-discovering our friendship after a year apart, he told me that he had liked kindergarten. I asked, "Was your teacher nice?"

"Yes, really nice."

"That's good," I joked, "because you had a really mean preschool teacher."

It took him a beat to realize I was talking about myself, but when it clicked, he laughed. "You're not mean!"

"Thanks for saying that. I try to be nice."

He thought for a second, "You're not that nice!" It was his turn to tell a joke.

"Hey!"

We laughed. He was then quiet for a moment, a smile still playing on his lips, eyes rolled up as if looking into his brain, then, "You're not mean or nice, you're more of a joke-y teacher. That's why I like coming here!" Best friends tell you the truth, especially when they know it will make you glow. His future teachers are the luckiest people on earth.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Children are Not Nouns. They are Verbs.

"To garden," writes Ferris Jabr in his book Becoming Earth, "is to engage in a form of coevolution -- not just with plants and pollinators but also with roots and fungi, microbes and microfauna, sun and soil."

Our garden in the center of our preschool playground is a place to play. The plants are there to explore with our fingers, our eyes, our noses, and our tongues. We discovered one year that we enjoyed eating radish seed pods more than the radishes themselves, which we had neglected to harvest, making it possible to experience those pods. 

We tend to think of farmers as people who "work" the soil, who tend and harvest radishes and other plants as food, ripping them by the roots, leaving only a few to serve as seed stock for the next crop. But "to garden," I think, is a wholly different thing: it is a process of existing with these plants, pollinators, fungi, microbes, microfauna, sun and soil. That is to say, to play with them, or put another way, to co-evolve.

When children play together we see them adapt to one another through an ever-moving process of agreement, negotiation, and bickering. Sometimes it all erupts in a kind of supernova of impossibility, everyone scattered, everyone briefly on their own as they seek others with which to play. Other times it dwindles to an end. But if the game is to continue, everyone must find a way to get their own needs and desires met while creating the space for others to get their needs and desires met. This means it must change, must evolve, or die, like everything.

We tend to talk about evolution as something that happened over millennia, or as a competition, or as a climb toward some higher state. When children play, however, they are simply doing it.

They are not nouns, but rather verbs. They are both shaping the process and being shaped by it. They are in the midst of the process that connects us with one another, and with everything. It's a process without beginning or end or purpose other than to sustain itself by becoming something else.

A game of chase becomes a game of fighting becomes a game of "let's pretend" becomes . . . And so on. Play, like learning, like gardening, like living, is a process that interacts with other processes. Children too are processes, not products. 

So much of conventional education treats childhood as a manufacturing operation whose product is a particular kind of adult. School readiness. Kindergarten readiness. College readiness. Career readiness. We're forever evaluating children according to what they're going to become rather than attending to what's happening right now. It's like we see ourselves as farmers producing a crop rather than gardeners tending a garden.

When we're gardeners -- to garden -- we don't have to teach children to understand the assignment. We don't have to get them ready. When they are playing, making art, wondering, talking, building, destroying, rebuilding, running, pretending, they aren't producing things, they are making connections. They are engaged in co-evolution.

Maybe our greatest mistake isn't that we've failed to teach children how the universe works, but rather that we persist in interrupting them while they're already doing it.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Playing at the End of Summer

For a time, the children gathered together around the workbench where they made things with junk using glue guns. Others chose to create using construction paper, tape, and staplers. They talked quietly amongst themselves as they worked, sharing tools and ideas as they went.

After a while, in ones and twos, they declared their projects complete and began to move away into the rest of the playground. Someone began to work the handle on the cast iron pump and the flow of water attracted the children, who took up shovels to direct the flow of the water. There was talk of creating a lake that was deep enough to float the old row boat that has rested in the sandpit for over a decade. They organized themselves.

It was a warm, breezy end of summer day. I tried not to think of all those poor children who were already back school. It's impossible not to think of it as an outright robbery. For me, summer belongs to children. Only a self-important killjoy would take that away. I was grateful to live in a place that at least respects childhood enough to give them a proper summer. 

I was sitting with a mother whose oldest daughter just completed her first year of public school kindergarten. As we watched the children from afar she sighed. Her children had been part of Woodland Park for the past five years, a place where the seasons change, but the spirit of summer feeds the entire year. She said, "Kindergarten was great, but it made me doubt myself. When we're here I know my kids are doing the right thing." 

No one ever needs "desk time" more than they need this. 

Earlier in the week, I performed a little slight-of-hand for the kids. Some of them figured out how I did it, which lead to a conversation about magic that has stretched out over hours and days. Some of them believe in magic, others think it's all slight-of-hand. We've wondered about unicorns and tooth fairies. We had a long conversation about dragons. We discussed the fire-breathing kind, but also the metaphorical ones that exist in Chinese mythology: the creative dragon that flows through our minds as we make art, or the water dragon that exists in the flow of water coming from the pump, or the fire dragon that makes the sun so hot. One group of siblings told us they were taking a weekend drive up onto the mountain dragon's back where there would still be snow even in the summer. And then there was the heavenly dragon, who is so large and powerful that its entire body is made of pearls of wisdom and other dragons.

Some of us danced together. Some of us danced while hanging upside down by our knees.

Summer, childhood, where there is no such thing as falling behind. The dragon myths are uplifting, but the one about falling behind is crushing our children and crushing our families. Indeed, it's not even a myth, but rather one of those dark fairytales designed to frighten us into "proper" behavior. I've heard of teachers being celebrated for giving children short breaks to dance at their desks, a crowd control technique that empties dance of its joy and freedom. Indeed, it's not even dance.

I recently had lunch with a friend who teaches in the public schools. She's always been a ball-of-fire, aware of the flaws in our educational system, but convinced that she, at least for the children in her life, could overcome them. This time she told me, "I no longer think I can change the world. I'm not even sure I can change the world for a single child." She had hoped that the pandemic would have opened people's eyes to what we are doing to children in the name of "desk time" and the fear of falling behind, but, as she said, "Everyone is just rushed to get right back to the crap." 

Against this background, I watched these children play in their natural habitat. I took several deep breaths, allowing myself to join them in this genuine moment of summer, of childhood, without adults breathing down their necks, without having to get career and college ready, without worry over the myth of falling behind. This is what young children should be doing: creating, digging, splashing, talking about dragons, and dancing, not in a rush, but in the warmth of a lazy mid-summer day.

******

Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Love of Children v. the Love of Money

On the one hand, we have hundreds of children being currently imprisoned in concentration camps by our federal government and billionaire child rapists being protected by our courts, politicians, and the Justice Department. On the other, we have consistent and chronic underfunding of anything having to do with children and families, including education.

We are lead to believe that the culture war is about books, bathrooms, religion, patriotism, or “family values.” It's not. The real culture war is between people who love children and systems that love money. It's easy to despair, but there is some good news.

The Iowa state legislature is putting the finishing touches on a law that would mandate play-based learning in preschool and kindergarten. The law requires a minimum of 3 hours per day of play and child-directed experiences, including unstructured classroom discovery, in addition to recess and physical education. The law only specifies 45 minutes per day in kindergarten, but it's still an important step in the right direction.

Iowa joins Connecticut (2024), New Hampshire (2018), and Oklahoma (2021), all of which have legislated play for their youngest citizens. Nevada, Maine, Michigan, and Illinois have all adopted or are considering play-friendly policies and approaches. The Connecticut law even permits play-based learning through 5th grade. Of course, none of these laws goes far enough in my opinion, but they're all encouraging steps in the right direction.

For better or worse, our Constitution explicitly puts states in charge of education. The federal government is meant to be hands off, leaving states the freedom to experiment. The idea is that if something works in one state, it will be adopted by others. Of course, the federal government, with it's ability to grant or withhold funding has, under both Democrats and Republicans, tried to force misguided educational mandates on our schools (e.g., No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core). This federal (and I think illegal) incursion into our public schools has been one of the main driving forces behind the drill-and-kill high stakes testing regime that has come to dominate the educational experience of a vast majority of our children, including, cruelly, preschoolers and kindergarteners. 

My hope is that what we are seeing right now is the beginning of a trend in which states take meaningful corrective measures to protect children from those who love money more than children. 

Of course, legislation is not the same thing as making real change. Legislation signifies a direction, in this case a positive one, but it still takes people to make change happen.

For one thing, play, like love, is a notoriously illusive thing to define. Each state has adopted its own definition. I see words and phrases we've all used to describe our work, like "child-directed," "unstructured classroom discovery," "developmentally appropriate," "free play," "games," "movement," "socially interactive," and even "joyful." But when the rubber meets the road, as with anything to do with schools, it comes down to how individual teachers implement it.

Some veteran teachers in Connecticut, for instance, are requiring children to make a plan for their play and stick to it, in the name of "teaching" executive function. I'm pretty sure that can't be taught. It's something that develops through life experience, like those encountered while playing. In Oklahoma, the law prohibits districts from restricting teacher's use of play-based learning, but doesn't exactly require it. The New Hampshire and Connecticut laws define the role of teacher as "facilitator" or "guide on the side," but there is a lot of wiggle room. Only Iowa imposes a minimum number of hours for play-based learning, which means that in the other states the amount of play permitted to children can vary depending on the teacher's bent. It leaves the door wide open for play being dangled before children as a kind of reward or punishment, instead of a right.

Still, I'm encouraged. But if we are going to make these laws effective, we are going to have to tighten up our definitions of play and make sure that educators are well-trained in play-based pedagogy. As a play-purist, I'd like to see young children (and that includes children up to at least 10-years-old), playing all day. I know that's not realistic in the current climate, but we should have, as in the Iowa law, minimums set for preschoolers and kindergarteners, otherwise  play will continue to be treated as a "relief from serious learning" rather than the proper work of childhood (to paraphrase Mister Rogers). And I would definitely want to see us getting our children outside and away from screen-based technology which is replacing authentic childhood with artificial experiences.

I remain encouraged, even in a world that too often seems to love money more than children. I'm grateful to the bi-partisan coalition of legislators who are compelling schools to follow the science of learning and best practices by mandating play. And I'm fully in awe of those advocates -- educators and parents -- who have had the tenacity and skill to convince these legislators to do the right thing for our youngest citizens.

This is progress. Let's keep it up! No turning back!

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Playing Our Way to Culture

"Octograbbers" was a Woodland Park fad for a time. To become an Octograbber, you had to have two of our playground shovels, one in each hand, which, of course, limited your ability to use your hands. If you wanted to pick something up, and that was a big part of the fad, you had to use your shovels like a pair of tongs in order to "grab" things. I have no idea where the "octo-" part came from, except to guess that it had something to do with octopuses. 

It started with a couple boys, spread to a wider group, and grew to include an ever-evolving collection of children to the point that there was daily bickering over shovels. It then ebbed and flowed, only dying out completely when the school year ended and the children scattered to their separate lives. 

Play theorists tell us that human culture is, at least in part, a product of play -- music, dance, art, fashion, and fads, but also social norms, customs, beliefs, values, and symbolic systems like language and communication. These are not instincts we are born with, but rather behaviors that we learn, which is why culture traditionally varies so much from place to place. We're likely the only preschool on earth to have played our way to a the specific cultural phenomenon of Octograbbers, but I reckon that every preschool has experienced its own unique cultural trends, for a week, a month, or a year . . . Or longer, as returning children revive certain games or themes year after year.

Culture emerges wherever humans come together, but it's not just humans.

I've written before about the resident orca pods in the Pacific Northwest that have been observed swimming with dead salmon on their heads. They were first noticed in the 1980's. The behavior seemed to then disappear for time before reemerging again recently, like a retro fad. The leading theory is that it's a form of social fad, one that is not shared by other orca pods around the world.

Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, Australia carry sea sponges on their snouts as protective tools for foraging on the seafloor in order to prevent injuries from the sharp rocks and corals. This behavior is mostly found in females and is passed on by dolphin mothers to their daughters, in what researchers point to as evidence of a cultural tradition being passed along through the generations. Again, other populations of bottlenose dolphins don't engage in this specific behavior, although they likely have their own, unique cultural practices.

Cultural behaviors begin in play. Humans and marine mammals aren't the only ones. Ravens, chimpanzees, and other species have played been observed playing their way to unique manifestations of culture. We spend a lot of energy in the play based world trying to "defend" play by pointing out the "academic" learning that happens, but most of what is learned through play is cultural.

I'm currently re-reading George Eliot's Middlemarch. In some ways it's a typical Victorian novel, set in an inward-looking rural county. There are occasional references to the king and parliament and London and the wider world in general, but mostly what occupies the people is what's happening amongst themselves, their unique Middlemarch culture. This is how humans have lived for most of our existence. This is what we're evolved to attend to: our immediate world of fellow humans. The modern world, however, is increasing destroying these unique, local cultures, homogenizing it, and putting it online. Of course, there are unique, online communities, but they lack the physical proximity that characterizes the cultures of play based preschools and orca pods. This is not to dismiss the experiences of those who thought they were all alone, only to find their community online, but at the end of the day, if that doesn't ultimately lead to physical proximity, the opportunity to actually "play" together in a daily, consistent, give-and-take way, the culture that emerges, I fear, will be impoverished.

Maybe this is just an old man's perspective, but I grew during the emergence of TV and mass media in general. I still remember local newspapers and radio programs that were all about my own unique pod or county or preschool, where everyone knew one another, or at least knew someone who knew someone, but today culture is increasingly global. I think half our stress comes from the fact that we haven't evolved to attend to the whole world: we've evolved to attend to what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, and that includes actual, embodied human beings with who we can create meaningful culture on a local level.

The mother of one of the core Octograbbers told me that her son was at first upset to find that his new kindergarten didn't have full sized shovels, just little spades. She told me that she knew he was going to be okay, however, when he came home a few days later talking about playing "Baby Snow Leopards." At the end of the day, creating culture together is a central aspect of how humans have evolved to connect. It gives us the sense that we belong. And it begins with play.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Boy Told Me, "There's Going to Be a Lot of Fighting This Year"

On the first day of school he told me, "There's going to be a lot of fighting this year." It was an interesting comment, funny even, coming from this particular boy. I'd known him since he was a two-year-old and he had never shown any inclination toward violence, real or imaginary. On the contrary, tough guy bluster, even of the comical variety, had in the past often seemed to intimidate and confuse him. He was regularly reduced to tears by dramatic play that struck him as threatening, often retreating under our classroom loft for "safety."

Jousting with swings standing in for steeds

His mother explained that he had over the summer become fascinated with knights, including their armor, shields, and other weaponry, items he had taught himself to create using paper, scissors, tape, and staples. And that is how his "fighting" first showed up in the classroom, with him not only arming himself, but also others. He had mastered the fierce pose and when he found another kid inclined toward "fighting," he might threaten something like, "You better watch out, I'm going to fight you." The fighting itself was quite tame by the standards of Woodland Park play fighting, most often involving "swords," but sometimes featuring "jousting." He was clearly thrilled when someone engaged with him, although the moment actual contact was made, even when of the light and incidental variety, he usually called it off, often crying loudly. But once the tears were over, he was back at it, once more trying to lure others into his game of fighting knights.

This knight has been unseated

I hope this description doesn't make him seem like a problem child in any way, because he was not. No one who knew him was worried that he would grow up to be actually violent. This was clearly an intellectual pursuit, one full of questions to which he was seeking answers. Even months into the school year there was still obvious uncertainty as he approached others with his knight game, as he tested the others to see how they would respond. He was delighted by his successes: his face flushed with excitement when it was going as he expected, combatants committed to both ferocity and a kind of chivalry that included not really hurting one another. He was overwhelmed when others surpassed him in intensity or more extreme physicality. He was often disappointed by those who were neither impressed, nor attracted by this knight who was threaten-asking them to fight with him. He had made his knight studies at home as a self-selected "academic" pursuit and was now attempting to apply what he had learned in real life.

One of his classmates did a similar thing with his own animal studies. Earlier in the year, he could be found prowling the playground as a dinosaur, usually as a T-rex, his favorite, roaring and stalking about with his arms draw up to mimic the short forearms associated with the species. Then his interests turned to invertebrates, like his pet snails, but also slugs, worms, and insects. One day, he put shoes on his hands so that he could practice moving like an insect, developing a fuller understanding of how they crawl by studying it with his whole body, in the same way that my knight-loving friend sought to embody a knight in order to more fully understand.

Neither of these boys would be described as particularly physical, at least not in comparison to many of their classmates who spend their days racing around the place. In fact, when they moved on to public kindergartens the following year, they both adapted to desk work better than most. They will never show up as a "problem child" because they possess the sort of self-control and temperaments that will allow them to adapt more easily than will those "active" kids whose teachers will chase them around the classroom, scolding, punishing, and otherwise correcting them for moving their bodies at the wrong time and in the wrong way, perhaps even going so far as to recommend drugs.

It's a pity because it's clear that all children, even not obviously active ones, learn most naturally when allowed to engage their full selves, including their bodies, not in adult-proscribed ways and at adult-proscribed times, but as their own questioning and exploration dictates. Standard schools are notoriously bad at allowing this because so much of what happens in them is about crowd control rather than learning. We can't have knights and insects anywhere but in the form of words, read or listened to, then regurgitated in their approved form, with bodies in their proper places, doing their proper things. It's a pity because all children learn best when allowed to explore with their full-selves, teaching themselves. And they must use their full bodies to do it.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Telling Our Stories

Yesterday, my wife Jennifer and I went to a local happy hour and enjoyed two hours re-living old stories. We've been together for over four decades now, so there are a lot.

We've experienced our share of highs and lows, but there has never been a dull moment. We've moved households and changed jobs dozens of times. Our lives have been touched by barons and divas as well as oddballs and crackpots, often embodied in the same person. We've taken wild risks, made stupid decisions, failed, floundered, and f---ed up. Yes, there have been high points, successes, and joys, but the stories we re-told last night, the ones we smiled and chucked over were objectively pretty awful as we lived them. Today, they're vital chapters in our story, ones we would never wish away. 

"(W)e think we tell stories, but often the stories tell us," writes Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby, her brilliant exploration of the human capacity for narrative.

We are all storytellers, it's what our minds do. The world we "see" around us is really nothing but a collection of photons bombarding our eyes. It's our minds that make sense of them, that assemble them into something we can understand. We tell the story of those photons, just as we tell the story of the molecules, vibrations, electricity, gravity, and other phenomena that the totality of our senses take in. We create our stories both alone and in collaboration with one another, weaving together our agreements and disagreements, our insights and misunderstandings, making a reality that is nothing more or less than the story we tell.

And sometimes, like Jennifer and were doing, we tell the story, while other times it tells us. Much of what we remembered together last night were stories that had told us in the moment, but now, decades later, we have mastered them for better or worse. In therapy, we're meant to dig into those old stories, to disassemble them, to discover the "truth" that will bring us to a place where we can then heal through telling our story in a different way. As we told our stories together last night, it was obvious that this is exactly what we were doing.

Sitting with our memories is the domain of the old. Among writers it's said that the young write of feelings, while the old write of memories. The preschoolers in our lives are only just beginning their lifelong narrative, and it is one made largely of emotion and direct experience rather than sepia-toned reveries. As adults, we study children for clues as to what kind of adult they will become, what story they will tell. Sometimes we can guess at parts of it, but more often we can't. One of the children I was certain would one day become an attorney, did just that. The other became an actor . . . But they're young yet, so who knows, there are many chapters to go.

Some adults are desperate to tell a child's story for them. We see it all the time from parents who envision their baby at Stanford or starring in the movies. Our we see them helicoptering over their babies trying to somehow guarantee that there will be no disappointments or injuries or failures to mar their nascent narratives.

When we see this in parents we may have compassion for the instinct, but we worry that they are creating false or harmful narratives that their child will one day have to painfully rewrite if they are to be truly fulfilled. Or, perhaps worse, we worry that they are robbing their children of the opportunity to tell those vital stories of their resilience, recovery, and persistence.

Solnit writes: 

"I’ve heard from many women over the years, of the mother who gave herself away to everyone or someone and tried to get herself back from a daughter. Early on, she assured me that she had measured me as a toddler, doubled my height, and deduced that I would be five foot two, seven inches short than her, when I grew up and that my hair — white blond in my first years, lemon and then honey and then dirty blond streaked by the sun with gold as I grew older — was going to turn brown at any moment . . . This short, brown-haired daughter she decided upon was not terrifying, and she envisioned a modest future for me and occasionally tried to keep me to it."

We see this tendency more easily in parents, but it's likewise a pitfall for us educators. We often can't help but try tell their story right through to kindergarten, first grade, middle school and beyond. We see our role as getting them "ready" for what we think is next in their story. Indeed, we are often explicitly told that this is our job, but it is not. It's each child's job to tell their own story.

These young children have many chapters to go. They will tell and be told. They will sooner or later, whatever we do, find their own narrative. 

I often think that our most reliable guide in interacting with our fellow humans, young or old, is to consider how we will show up in their stories. Will we be friend, villain, or something else, like the Mad Hatter? I certainly don't want to be anyone's Herod or Voldemort or Uriah Heep. Let me be Joseph or Hagrid or Miss Betsy Trotwood and decades from now, when they sit with their memories, let them see that I was one of the people who helped them.

******

Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Facts About Play-Based Learning

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Economic Forum, and Unicef (and according to the dubious measurement of standardized test scores) Finland has the best schools in the world. They have achieved this status by building their educational system on evidence. The US languishes around the middle of the pack, often falling into the bottom half according to some measures. We have achieved this lack of success by relying upon the busy-body guesswork of policy makers, billionaire dilettantes, and administrators who listen to them.

It shouldn't be surprising that the system based on evidence, on research, on reality, would outperform the one based on the fantasies and feelings of people who are not professional educators. In Finland, they do not try to teach kindergarteners to read because the evidence tells us that formal literacy instruction should not start until at least the age of seven and that children who are compelled into it too early often suffer emotionally and academically in the long run. In the US we are forcing kindergartners, and even preschoolers, to learn to read. There is very little research that points to longterm gains from teaching children to read in kindergarten. In fact, most of the research that has been done tends to find early instruction reduces comprehension and reading for pleasure in later years.

The evidence tells us that early childhood education should focus on equity, happiness, well-being and joy in learning. This is what Finland has done by basing their educational model on childhood play, which is, again according to the overwhelming preponderance of research, the gold standard. The US has based its early childhood education on standardized testing, increased "instructional time," bottoms-in-your-seats carrot-and-stick standardization, and an ever-narrowing focus on literacy and math despite the evidence that it causes longterm harm to children, because people in power who know nothing about education think that sounds good to them.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, the nation's oldest and largest professional association of pediatricians, affirms that play, and lots of it, is essential to the physical, mental, social, and intellectual health of children. Furthermore their clinical report on play finds that academic style instruction harms young children. Yet, our schools continue to double-down. In a sane world, we would see this as educational malpractice if not borderline abuse.

We are through the looking glass here. We are doing harm to our children. We are subjecting them to decades of "education" that is, again according to the evidence, doing them far more harm than good, while children in other countries are being provided the best education available because the adults are adult enough to look at reality and act accordingly.

This is the motivation behind Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp, for educators, parents, grandparents and caregivers seeking to offer the children in their care an authentic, playful childhood (see below). 

This is not my feeling. This is not my opinion. This is not my philosophy. These are the facts as far as we can currently determine them. It is cruel, even abusive, to base our educational system on other people's feelings and fantasies, even if they are rich and powerful. For the sake of our children, we must demand play-based education because, damn it, that's what the evidence tells us.

(Please click the links in this post. Most of them take you to articles, research, and papers that provide even further links into the evidence.)

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The science tells us that young children learn most of what they need to learn through play, through their self-selected activities, through asking and answering their own questions. Whether you are just starting out as a play-based educator, are a veteran of play, or are a parent/caregiver interested in providing children a playful childhood, please consider joining us. Teacher Tom's Play-Based Learning Summer Camp is an intensive week (August 2-8) based on my popular play-based pedagogy, designed to make you think deeply about the role you play in the lives of children, and give you the inspiration, insight and tools needed to create an environment of genuine play for the children in your life. I can't wait to share it with you! For more information and to register, click here

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

You'll Want to Bookmark This Clinical Report

In 2007 the American Academy of Pediatrics published its clinical report on the importance of play in the healthy development of children and young children in particular. It reaffirmed the report in 2018, citing new and growing evidence that the decline in childhood play is harming children physically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally. This report, which specifically points to the push-down of academic-style instruction into early years programs, was once more reaffirmed at the beginning of this year.

The AAP is the largest and oldest association pediatricians in the US.

I want to bring attention to this paper because almost every day someone writes to me asking for help in finding "data" or "research" or "evidence" that supports play-based learning. They are seeking to persuade nervous parents or dubious administrators that what they are doing in their play-based classrooms is the best practice when it comes to young children. Which is to say, giving children the permission and opportunity to follow our species' biological heritage to direct our own learning through self-selected pursuits, driven by curiosity (i.e., play). And that the increasing academic "rigor" that has come to replace play for too many children is directly harming them.

This report includes links to all of that and more. I urge everyone to bookmark this report.

Of course, I've learned that "facts" alone are rarely persuasive when it comes to play-based learning. The scientifically unsupported mythology of modern schooling has too strong of a hold on our cultural mindset to be unsettled by mere data, research or evidence. You will still need to turn to emotional arguments as well.

That said, parents tend to listen to their pediatricians, especially when they say that academic preschools are intellectually, physically, socially, and emotionally harmful to their children. This report provides the evidence.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 14 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!