Grist magazine has an interview with Richard Louv about why kids don’t play outside. He reports this telling incident:

I went with some gang members up to a nature preserve in the mountains near San Diego. These were really tough guys in their late teens, early 20s. They were with the Urban Corps and had been brought up to cut trails. The first morning in the woods, I realized these guys were terrified. People in these kinds of programs often report that phenomenon. One guy said, “It’s too noisy out here.” I said, “What are you talking about? You’re from a neighborhood where you hear gunfire in the background.” He says, “Yeah, but there’s about four or five sounds in my neighborhood and I know what they all mean. There are a lot of sounds out here and they seem to mean something, but I don’t know what it is.”

This fear of the outdoors goes far beyond urban neighborhoods. What’s your reaction to the newish forest kindergartens, where children spend their entire morning outdoors, regardless of the weather? Perhaps that it can’t be healthy for 5-year-olds to be out in rainy 40-degree weather for hours on end?

Well, the research on these places indicates that these kids are actually healthier and happier than their classroom-bound counterparts.

Although the idea isn’t for everyone, its success does add to mounting evidence that we’re excessively sheltering our tough little kids from outdoor experience. Because of fear.

Its not as if we’ve found a safe alternative in organized sports. According to Louv, doctors report that broken bone injuries are down of late, but repetitive motion injuries are way up. And, as Louv points out, a host of other childhood maladies have skyrocketed as outdoor time has plunged.

So, while we’re contemplating cancellation of recess, mandatory summer school, and higher test scores, let’s not forget this most basic of educational imperatives: every child needs first to be at home with his or her place as an organism on Earth. At stake is everything from individual health and happiness to the very future of the planet.

Louv’s story of the urban tough guys ends happily:

Watching these young guys was wonderful — as the day went on, the cynicism left their eyes and the flat affect fell from their faces. By the end of the day, these were 8-year-olds jumping over a creek. The people who work in these programs see that little miracle all the time. No kid in America or anywhere else should go without that miracle.

Amen.

Here’s a school with great test scores. Aren’t you intrigued? Well probably not.

But what if I told you the City Neighbors Charter School has a play-based kindergarten, a heavy arts emphasis throughout, and a diversity profile that matches most other Baltimore public schools?

A few children were playing in a sandbox. A couple of girls played with dolls. Two girls sat at a table drawing pictures. At another table, three boys slapped down mega-sized playing cards on a table, taking turns collecting the tricks they’d won.

“We have a play-based kindergarten,” said Bobbi Macdonald, a co-founder of the school who also volunteers as the board president of City Neighbors. “We believe 5-year-olds learn best through play.”

You cannot imagine how happy I am to hear about this school, because there’s a hurricane-force wind blowing the other way. Nearly everywhere else, principals trumpet their victories using new all-day kindergarten programs to get children reading before first grade.

But intensive reading programs for 5-year olds can do incredible damage. They magnify differences in experience and readiness that kids have when they enter school, setting the stage for a lasting achievement gap.

I know lots of parents who want their kids in separate kindergartens, or first grade, because their kids can read chapter books while their classmates are still learning their ABC’s. Their battle cry: “Stop holding our kids back!”

Then there are the kids who aren’t reading at 5. Some have limited exposure to books before school. But here in my relatively well-educated enclave, I know several families whose kids just weren’t ready to read in kindergarten, or weren’t ready to sit still and do formal academics. Those kids are all reading very well now, a couple years later. But oh, the misery in between, trying to hammer literacy into them before they were ready! And the kids hated school - cried every morning! - and felt like failures. The parents, who had read diligently to their kids and provided them with good preschool experiences, also felt like failures. Because their 5-year-olds couldn’t read.

So you’ve got inexperienced kids and not-yet-mature kids, and any of them might just be as smart as those chapter book readers. So don’t you think it’s a little premature to separate them out? At 5?

What to do? Teach something else for a year. That’s an alternative to teaching nothing, or teaching some kids while giving the others anxiety disorders. Also an alternative to grouping that ends up having a high correlation to race and income. Otherwise known as segregation.

I think kindergarten now is both too fast and too slow. Too fast to start formal reading instruction - it should be minimal in kindergarten. But much too slow in introducing kids to the wonders of knowledge - science and nature, vocabulary, historical tales, local geography, life skills, music, and art.

From an educator’s point of view, kindergarten should be focused on building general knowledge, vocabulary, fine motor skills, social skills, and number sense. Methods should include a wide range of concrete, hands-on, playful activities based in literature, art, life skills, and science.

From the students’ point of view, school should be highly stimulating and interesting on many levels. Kids should leave school each day with “guess what I learned” grins on their faces. To me, that’s a successful kindergarten experience. We have to ask ourselves if racing ahead on the measurable skills is worth missing out on those that are harder to measure, but just as important.

I think a curriculum like this would ameliorate differences in experience and maturity by giving a whole year of print exposure and a lot of vocabulary enrichment to kids who haven’t had much. BUT, because the curriculum would be infused with actual content that few 5-year-olds know, more-experienced kids wouldn’t be bored. They wouldn’t have to sit through elementary phonics instruction they didn’t need. And everyone would get a year to grow up.

I understand that this wouldn’t solve all differential needs. A few kids really are ready for first grade at 5. But I think it would avoid turning artificial and temporary differences into real, persistent, and soul-crushing ones.

Learning to read and do math have gone from being a means to an end - indispensable tools for learning - and become THE end in itself, the standard by which every child is measured, even in kindergarten. These skills ARE vital, but they don’t have to happen in kindergarten. Finland doesn’t start school until age 7, and they score at the top of the international heap in reading. That’s with a 15-minute recess every 45 minutes, and lots of arts instruction. Just saying.

NOTE: I had to close comments on this post, because it drew a lot of spam. Please e-mail me and I’ll post your comment.

Have you seen the news that Baby Einstein videos actually seem to inhibit language growth? The conclusion:

For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as “Brainy Baby” or “Baby Einstein,” they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.

The study goes on to suggest better activities:

Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.

“I would rather babies watch ‘American Idol’ than these videos,” Christakis said, explaining that there is at least a chance their parents would watch with them — which does have developmental benefits.

It’s a silly study in a way. Every HOUR? Seems to me if babies are spending two or more hours each day watching videos of any kind, they’ve got bigger problems than language growth.

But, the conclusion is good news. Because it just doesn’t make sense that babies, wired to explore the world with all their senses, could learn better by watching videos.

If you’d like to learn more about how babies and kids really learn, try the book Einstein Never Used Flash Cards. Here’s a link to my review of that book.

It’s summer. Time to play…video games? Apparently so, according to this article in the Washington Post. Especially depressing was this bit about a mother who’s a real nature enthusiast. If she can’t get her kids interested in nature, what hope do the rest of us have?

Linda Pelzman appreciates the beauty of the outdoor world, sometimes pulling her children into the yard to gaze at a full moon or peer into a dense fog. An educator and founder of a summer camp, she only wishes her enthusiasm was fully shared.

On a recent nature walk near her home in Gaithersburg, her younger son, 6, was unimpressed, pleading, “I just want to go back to civilization.” Her older son, at 13, has made it clear he prefers PlayStation.

Well, who can blame them, really. Nature is so, well, prickly compared to indoors. You can get all scraped up! Everything you want to handle is heavy, or dirty, or buggy. Plus, long stretches of time go by when absolutely nothing happens. And the things that happen can be scary or even dangerous!

If you think I’m just channeling my kids, I’m not. I’m pretty sure most adults feel the same way. Sometimes I feel the same way.

But this is one case where our emotional gut reaction is bad for us and bad for our kids. I want my kids to know they’ll be OK even if it’s hot, even if it’s buggy, even if they get scraped up, even if they’re not comfortably engaged in a controlled video-based experience where nothing real ever happens and you almost always win.

In real life, you never know when the air conditioner will fail.

So, here are some places to look for inspiration if you want to get family out of the indoor comfort zone.

Green Hour An initiative by the National Wildlife Federation to encourage kids to spend an hour each day playing outside.

Nature Activities for Kids Big Learning’s own nature site is chock full of quick activities and resources to help the whole family connect with nature.

Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv: My favorite book about kids and nature. Read a review.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/reportputsapacifieronsmarterbabydebate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040402715.html

Well, we consumers eventually get our just rewards for accepting teeny little research results as if they were truth revealed from on high. We pay good money for quick fixes, and then we feel betrayed when the results are later revealed to be inaccurate or oversimplified..

So it is with learning and intelligence. Refusing to believe that learning is a multi-facetted, complex process and that intelligence gets built over a lifetime, we look for the quick fix. This week brought news of two quick fixes that didn’t pan out: it turns out toys that are supposed to make smarter babies don’t work, and educational software doesn’t even raise test scores (the article doesn’t seem to mind equating that with improving education).

Have we learned our lessons? Well, the same day I read about the educational software, I read some big news: that playing music has been shown to make kids smarter.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070319/sc_livescience/playingmusicmakesyousmart

I guess I ought to market a product called “Baby Plays” that teaches babies to play concertos - make a quick buck while I can.

But think about it. Our minds have evolved over millions of years to learn from meaningful, varied activities over a long period of time. So we really ought to be very skeptical that one kind of activity, one piece of technology, one toy could make the difference between life success and failure, or between intelligence and stupidity.

Sometimes truth flies in the face of common sense, but I don’t think this is one of those times. And research seems to bear me out in the long run. So save your money and do Big Learning. It may be old-fashioned, but it works.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/02/25/us_schools_weigh_extending_hours_year/

This doesn’t sound so bad.

Usually people who talk about extending the school day are the same people who want to take away recess, hands-on science, and literature.

In this effort in Massachusetts, though, the extended hours go to elective classes that reinforce basics without focusing on them - sounds kind of like Big Learning to me. Examples are cooking and forensics. I’m especially hopeful because these are efforts focused on low-income kids, and reform programs almost never let them have any fun at school. So if kids have to be in institutional settings all afternoon anyway (because their parents work, for example), I hope this is the direction of the future.

Schools Move Beyond Traditional Playgrounds

Education Hi-tech toys offer no educational gain, say researchers

Ooh, these articles give me such warm fuzzies. From different perspectives they bring home the same Big Learning message: education focused obsessively on reading and math is an impoverished education.

The “Playgrounds” article describes a new movement to build playgrounds that are more nature-rich and less plastic. Apparently kids, given a choice, vote for the natural playgrounds over those ubiquitous giant play structures. This jibes with the “Loose Parts” theory of play, a term first coined by a British architect, Simon Nicholson. Nicholson said that the more loose parts a toy or play space has, the more options kids have for using it creatively, and the more fun they’ll have. As Richard Louv points out in his book, Last Child in the Woods, nature is the queen of loose parts, and the parts have a sensory richness not found in any other toy.

The “playgrounds” article explains how richer, more natural play spaces let kids get more of the benefits that recess is supposed to provide. They can organize complex pretend play, experiment with nature, and act out new ideas. They can climb, build, and get dirty. Because there’s more to do, the kids also fight less. And, a natural playground is cheaper and safer, according to the designer’s web site.

According to the “Hi-tech Toys” article, all those electronic gizmos that teach letters, numbers and colors to small children have no demonstrable educational benefit. Hot Dog. The whole early-reading early-math thing is getting ridiculous.

When my kids were preschoolers, I didn’t understand about preschool learning either. For example, at the age of three, my son got interested in dinosaurs. He really knew his dinosaurs. He knew the names of all the dinosaurs on his dinosaur poster.

He could not read yet. He had little interest in toys that tried to teach him to read.

Does he know his dinosaurs now, at age 11? No he does not. Nor does he have any memory of the Barney videos he played to death, or the Thomas the Tank Engine cars whose names he knew by heart. He can no longer recite the Poke-rap that names 100 Pokemons in order. But he reads very well and knows a whole lot of other stuff that matters more than Barney or Pokemon or even dinosaurs. In preschool, he got good at learning stuff - and it didn’t matter what the “stuff” happened to be.

Back then, I know I thought, in the back of my mind, “Well, we can already check dinosaurs off the list of things to learn. He knows them all.” I feel silly now about that - no particular thing they learn in preschool will stick unless they keep using it. And oddly, that’s good news.

It’s good news because since it JUST DOESN’T MATTER which particular knowledge a preschooler gets, we can all relax. What matters is the complexity of their environment and the degree to which their secure, loving human companions let them experiment with it and develop within it.

So let’s hear it for toys that don’t teach reading or math, toys with lots of loose parts (not choking hazards, obviously). Kids, you go play now.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06239/716712-298.stm

Oh, what a world. This article features expensive tutoring places defending the idea that learning to read is the best use of a two-year-old child’s time. It even uses one of my pet peeve, all-time fingernails-on-the-blackboard phrases:

“We’re teaching them that learning can be fun.”

Take my word for it. When someone uses that phrase, what they’re really saying is, “We’re teaching them that learning meaningless, age-inappropriate, abstract drivel can be fun, IF you make it meaningful by dangling material rewards, adult praise, points, or high status in front of them.”

KIDS ALREADY KNOW LEARNING IS FUN. They do it all day long, every day, especially when they’re little. Nothing is more fun (in the sense of satisfying and engaging) for kids than learning.

But what they aren’t born knowing, but can be taught, is that displaying academic knowledge is a good way to get adults to notice and exclaim over them. And that a tot with a lot of academic knowledge is seen as smarter. And that this adult-praise, high-status candy is sweet enough to make a kid forget the rewards of learning to swing or finger-paint.

I have my issues with Maria Montessori, founder of the Montessori School movement. But I think she was spot-on in her technique of offering academics. The idea, as I understand it, is you offer a child a new task. If they seem interested, you help them get started. If not, you put it away - without pleading or judgment. Always, you offer new tasks based on your direct observation of the child. You don’t apply pressure based on what you think children ought to be learning at that age.

See this article to learn more, or read Discovery of the Child by Maria Montessori.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0614/p17s01-cogn.html

Like the children of the author of this article, my kids have played the online game Runescape. They create characters for themselves, meet friends online, and try to advance in the game. Runescape is dragon fighting sort of enterprise with a medieval setting. Players worldwide can talk and interact with one another, typing messages in real time. They can trade their online possessions (their swords, armor, or gold) and team up to help each other out.

The game has rules against profanity, verbal abuse, and the like. Players can report violators and the violators can be booted from the game.

The author of the article argues that when kids learn the rules of these communities, they are learning valuable lessons about civics and citizenship, and that maybe these lessons will translate into a more civic-minded populace offline. And what if there were games that were fun and actually taught history?

Well, OK. But I think kids learn rules of engagement in all communities of which they are a part. They learn that people look at you funny if you drool; they learn who at school to avoid and who to befriend and how to stay uninjured if you have to be lab partners with the school bully. They learn these behaviors in a much richer way in the real world. In fact, I think kids like online and computer-based worlds because they are simpler - the interactions are constrained and safe (you’re not going to be physically injured) and fairly predictable. That simplicity can be seductive and I don’t let my kids get too used to it, though I do let them play during their allotted half-hour of computer time.

Why? Because it’s part of their real-world culture. The kids at school talk about it, they compare stories, they exchange tips and tricks. Now we’re talking. Literally. For them, at certain points, the game has greased the wheels of their real-world social interaction, and I think that’s a good thing. I just don’t count on Runescape to teach them not to drool in public.

My younger son says you DO learn stuff from Runescape - you learn to type a lot faster!

Leonardo’s Basement: Hands-on Learning for Kids

http://www.connectforkids.org/node/4069

How does test-driven schooling affect after-school programs? Some are falling right in line, offering more of the same test prep and drill after school. It’s good to know that there are programs like Leonardo’s Basement, which offer kids the chance for hands-on, creative activities that build skills kids don’t get in school.

I like that many of the activities are developed by kids, and that the directors are aware of the big learning (math, science, etc.) without pushing specific curricular objectives. They talk about the importance of kids learning to direct their own activity in a world where adults tend to fill every moment for them.