Natural playgrounds are a solution that speaks to problem-solving deficit disorder, a term coined by Diane Levin in 2003 and has written about (such as in So Sexy, So Soon); and also for nature-deficit disorder, which Richard Louv writes about in Last Child in the Woods. It seems a little sad, perhaps, that we’ve gotten to this place where we actually need designed spaces for kids to play with natural materials.  But there you have it: this is just what we need. Otherwise, for too many of our children, it just isn’t happening. Natural playgrounds remind me of the song “Water, Sand, Blocks and Clay” by Brady Rymer which I used to sing with my 5, 6 and 7 year olds,

“I will make a mountain tall and I will build a castle wall,

I will make a forest green and I will make a flowing stream,

’cause I got everything I want and everything I’ll ever need,

and I will play all day with my water, sand, blocks and clay…”

A great song to sing and a great way to play.

For a related story about nature play on playgrounds, see my previous post about the new book Playing for Keeps:Life and Learning on a Public School Playground by Deborah Meier, Beth Taylor and Brenda Engel.

You see, back in May, Science Daily reported: “Exposure to specific bacteria in the environment, already believed to have antidepressant qualities, could increase learning behavior, according to research presented at the 110th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego.” Read the whole story here.

The researches found the effects were temporary, which means repeated exposure is good. Their research helps the growing  movement of outdoor classrooms, school yard gardens and bringing kids (and all of us) back outside. Personally, I know that when I am stressed, time outdoors always helps. I’ve known babies who would stop crying and fussing when they were brought outdoors.  I can relate because I am the same way. As a teacher, I always knew that time outside in nature was good for kids – especially as television, video games and the internet were keeping them more and more inside. I wrote more about nature and education in this article, “We Need More Sticks and Grass! We Need More Beauty!” .

Now, having evidence that being outside in nature can actually increase learning behavior – this is the icing on the cake. “This research suggests that M. vaccae may play a role in anxiety and learning in mammals,” says Matthews. “It is interesting to speculate that creating learning environments in schools that include time in the outdoors where M. vaccae is present may decrease anxiety and improve the ability to learn new tasks.”

Looking for more evidence that time spent outdoors is good for our children? Here’s more.  There’s a terrific new book just published by Teachers College Press. It is called  Playing for Keeps: Life and Learning on a Public School Playground, by Deborah Meier, Brenda S. Engel and Beth Taylor. The book comes at just the right time, when parents and teachers are looking for ways to convince principals and policy makers that recess is a necessary and valuable part of the school day. The book is written about the early years at the Mission Hill School in Boston, a school that I am proud to have helped start and then teach at for eleven years. The authors are all incredibly talented teachers and mentors, who helped me learn how to closely observe children and the deep importance of active learning. It is from these women that I learned much of what I know about being a good teacher.

From the introduction, “We invite readers to appreciate the life of the imagination on the playground, to see the energy children bring to exploring their social and physical surrounds, and to share with us the children’s delight in active learning.”

If your children are outside – playing, living, laughing, learning and getting dirty – these two new bodies of evidence help confirm what you already know. If your children are inside more than you like, and you are advocating for recess, struggling to bring  a garden to your school yard or working to bring more outdoor recreation spaces into your community, now you have two new powerful weapons in your arsenal. Excellent.

I’ve also been reading the Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession With Stuff is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health – and a Vision For Change by Annie Leonard. It is a real wake-up call. I try to be environmentally conscious – but by reading this book I’ve realized there is so much more we as a country can – and should – be doing. Leonard reveals, “We have a problem with Stuff. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, we’re consuming 30 percent of the world’s resources and creating 30 percent of the world’s waste. If everyone consumed at U.S. rates, we would need three to five planets!” My only hope is that this horrifying oil disaster will be the rude awakening our country needs.

(It’s not a spill, by the way. A spill is what my son does with his glass of orange juice. It’s a pain to clean up the spill, but we can do it in a few minutes. What is happening in the Gulf of Mexico is a man-made disaster. Definitely not a spill.)

Do the world a favor and forgo all the thousands of Toy Story 3 plastic junk, and all the other aggressively marketed single-purpose toys, and opt for good old fashioned imagination-inducing fabric scraps, empty containers of any type, art supplies, pebbles and the like. Its not easy to break the habit of consumption – believe me, the LEGO situation in my own house is admittedly out of control. We are working on it, though, and my husband has finally agreed that there is such a thing as “too many LEGOs”. Check out this fantastic article Children, Commercialism, and Environmental Sustainability by Tim Kasser, Tom Crompton, and Susan Linn.

Related posts:

Reduce, Reuse and Re-imagine!

Empowered by Play’s Toy of the Year Award: Nature!

When Did Sesame Street Become $esame $treet?

Way Too Many Toys

Announcing TRUCE’s Infant-Toddler Toys, Play &  Media Action Guide!

The Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, not how teachers should teach. For instance, the use of play with young children is not specified by the Standards, but it is welcome as a valuable activity in its own right and as a way to help students meet the expectations in this document.

How great is that?! A definite victory for the early childhood world. It is such a victory, that a few days later, on Saturday June 5th, Joan Almon of the Alliance for Childhood included it (several times!) in her keynote address at the Hudson Valley Writer’s Project Annual Early Childhood Conference. I agreed with Joan when she said we should be shouting these words from the rooftops. “…the use of play with young children is not specified by the Standards, but it is welcome as a valuable activity in its own right and as a way to help students meet the expectations in this document.” Did you catch that play is “a welcome activity in its own right” ?!

I went back to the Common Core Standards website and hunted for those powerful words. I looked everywhere I could think of, clicking every link a kindergartner teacher might choose for information. I couldn’t find the words – and I was determined to know exactly where they were. I contacted Lisa Guernsey and she helped me zero in. They are on page six of the sixty-six page document for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. They are in the first bullet in the section titled, “What is Not Covered by the Standards”. Awesome!

The conference on Saturday was the perfect place to celebrate this victory. The theme of the conference was “Constructing Worlds, Composing Stories: Where Literacy and Play Meet”. The conference was designed for “educators interested in exploring the role of play in children’s learning, literacy and social and physical development.”

The range of workshops included Storytelling; Dramatic Play; Music and Movement; Nature and Blocks – each bringing in specifics about how literacy, math, science and cooperative play are all woven together in rich and engaging learning experiences. Together, these workshops demonstrated how meaningful learning happens through play.

Blocks are one of my favorite things in the whole wide world, so I was drawn to Rebecca Burdett’s workshop, “Let Me Build You a Story: Literacy in the Block Area”. I had the honor of visiting Rebecca’s kindergarten classroom in November, and was impressed with her ability to juggle state and district mandates while staying true to what is good for children. I could feel it the moment I entered her room. It was alive with learning in a way many kindergarten classrooms just aren’t anymore.

Luckily, I don’t have to describe what Rebecca has been doing, because she has a link to some of her work – a stories created by her students – on her school’s website. What is truly amazing, is that Rebecca was able to do this work with her students, and then capture it in a way that is easy to share. Her principal was impressed and invited her to bring the work to the school board. Not only did Rebecca bring the digital story, and the process documented in a Power Point, she also brought some of her kindergartners to advocate!  You see, when Rebecca returned to her present school to teach- after having been away – she found no blocks had been left in the classroom. She knew that she could not do her job without a good set of blocks – and she found a way to get blocks donated from the folks at Community Playthings. Rebecca wanted to find a way to bring more blocks back to her school. She described for us how her young students stood up in front of the board, at seven o’clock at night, and read the reflections they had written about their love of working with blocks.

The board was so impressed, they decided to budget block purchases for all the first grade classrooms in her school – and next year for all the second grade classrooms. (They found a way to allocate text book money!) Through Rebecca’s presentation, the board was able to understand the deep, rich experiences and real learning that can come through block play. She made the learning visible to them. Brilliant!

The power of advocacy cannot be underestimated. Just look: The Common Core Standards include a statement about the value of play and a school board is bringing blocks back into classrooms. These are the stories that give me hope. Let us shout them from the rooftops!

This blog began in May 0f 2009, and since then, I have been on the computer more than I ever have before. It often strikes me as ironic, that in my efforts to encourage imaginative play, and to help families and children reduce screen-time, I have increased my own screen-time. Yuck. I am trying to do more connecting and sharing of ideas and information through Twitter and Facebook – and doing so has actually helped me cut down on my time online. I was worried about adding them to the Empowered by Play networking plan, in that they might increase my time spent in front of the screen, but thankfully the opposite has proven to be true.

Nature. That’s where you’ll find me, whenever possible. Right in my own yard, usually – where the bird feeders, breezes, flowers and general green-ness help me relax. This weekend in the backyard, I even spied two spirited fox kits playing and wrestling while their mom watched nearby. Very cool. It reminded me of Bill Crain’s piece about the need for play being innate. Clearly, for these young fox kits, it is. And for my kids, too. In fact, my son just came up and asked me to play – so I’ll be signing off.

Here’s to playing outside, finding snakes, swinging in the breeze and picking ripe strawberries!

In honor of Free-Range Kids creator Lenore Skenazy’s “Take Your Kid to the Park & Leave Them There Day “on Saturday, I decided to hang back as much as possible this weekend, as my sons played at the public playground. Since my boys are only six, and we didn’t have an older kid to bring with us, I couldn’t completely leave them, but I sat further away than usual. I was close enough to watch and hear many of the interactions, and I have to say I was impressed with all of the kids and how they managed. There were a fair number of 8-10 year-olds playing together without a grown up. My sons joined them in a game of tag, and when my son fell (twice) and cried out “Ow!”, both times a child from the group stopped playing long enough to check that the little one was okay. Nice.

My sons were fascinated with a group of middle schoolers and giggled in delight as the “big kids”  rocked wildly on the small  horses. My sons watched closely as this group of middle school aged kids played, laughed, chatted and flirted (all face-to-face with very little cell phone use!). When one of the older boys started using dicey language, his friends kept him in check, saying, “Hey, there’s kids right over there.” When an older girl sitting in a tree called down to my son, “Hey, little kid! Am I fat?!” He thought for a moment, then looked right back at her and yelled, “Who cares?!” and continued playing. (Later he told me about the interaction and revealed, “Well, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and I didn’t want to lie.”) Pretty good thinking on your feet for a six-year-old.

My sons tried and tried to get themselves onto a teeter-totter, but once one boy was on, the opposite end was always too high for the other to reach. Eventually, they found that if they both sat towards the fulcrum at the middle, instead of on the seats at the end, they could play that way, and make the ride go up and down.

These “problems” illustrate how capable kids are when they have the opportunity to experience situations and try out solutions. These days, however, due to our culture of fear, kids are not often left to their own devices. They don’t have opportunities to become self-reliant, capable, creative problem solvers. This is precisely why Lenore came up with the idea of  “Bring Your Kids to the Park and Leave Them There” day – so kids today could start coming  back outside (instead of watching TV or surfing the Internet) and discover other kids to play with. Heck, when I was 6 years old I used to walk to the corner store with a few friends. I distinctly remember one day when we went – without adults – to buy a frozen banana dipped in chocolate. Yum! And it wasn’t just delicious and satisfying because it was a frozen treat.  The whole experience of walking along the road, making a decision, handing over the money (I think it was a dime) and walking home was in itself satisfying. The frozen banana was just part of the sweet reward.

We also rode bikes, played in the woods and wandered the neighborhood for hours. Lots of kids did; it would be weird if you didn’t. And the few times I remember someone getting seriously hurt (like emergency-room-visit hurt), we knew where the grown ups were, and precisely how to summon them in a hurry. Without cell phones, of course.

So thank you to Lenore Skenazy for starting this movement. Many folks think she is a kook (see this article in The NY Daily News). She’s not a kook. She is, however, a hoot.  (She gave an absolutely hilarious talk at the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood’s Consuming Kids Summit in April.  Here’s to hoping it’ll be available on You Tube soon.)  Not only is she a hoot but is, in my book, a hero.

The first resource is the brief, yet compelling argument that play is innate (Is Children’s Play Innate?) presented by City College Professor Bill Crain and published in the current issue of Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice (Vol. 23, No. 2.).  Crain lays out his theory through looking closely at three lines of research and concludes, “when contemporary educators reduce playtime, they might be frustrating an innate need.” Consider this excerpt:

Additional evidence that play is innate comes from George Eisen’s little-known (1988) account of children in the ghettos and concentration camps of the Holocaust. One might suppose that the children’s hunger, fear, and anguish would have completely suppressed their desire to play, but this didn’t happen. Summarizing the diaries and reports of Holocaust victims, Eisen (1988, 66) says, “Play burst forth spontaneously and uncontrollably without regard to the external situation.” Lacking manufactured toys, the children made their own — out of mud, snow, rags, and pieces of wood. When a skeptical interviewer asked a girl how she could have played in Auschwitz, her face lit up and she said, “But I played! I played with nothing!With the snow! With the balls of snow!” (p. 72)

I was impressed with Crain’s reasoning when he shared his thoughts at the In Defense of Childhood conference back in March. I have been telling others about this amazing Holocaust story and have continued to ponder his ideas. I am thankful to have a written piece to contemplate and pass along.

The second resource is the essay Core Standards in Kindergarten by teacher Dr. Eric Gidseg  in the current issue of Collage published by Community Playthings. The entire issue is dedicated to the Common Core Standards and the implications for early childhood. Gidseg eloquently uses the story of his young student Gabe to illustrate a very real struggle that kindergarten teachers are facing everyday:

Gabe is a bright little boy in my kindergarten class with sparkling blue eyes and loads of enthusiasm and energy. He knows just about everything that there is to know about fire engines and rescue vehicles. He can stand before a classroom of five-year-olds, show his detailed drawings of a ladder truck, and describe how it is used by firefighters when they attack a fire. Over the course of this school year Gabe has taken just about every book on firefighting and fire equipment out of the school library. Gabe is not yet secure, however, in the connection between the letters of the alphabet and their sounds, nor is he able to count beyond the number 15 without becoming confused and repeating himself. This is in spite of daily classroom experiences and instruction to support such learning, differentiated for his current level of achievement.

I am faced with a challenge. I know from more than 30 years of experience as a kindergarten teacher that there’s nothing wrong with Gabe—that he will learn to read and count perfectly well, given time and encouragement. But he has not met the standards that have been created to guide kindergarten instruction and learning. This child will have a failing report card if I cannot help him to master these skills. In spite of my long experience, I am unsure of myself as I am forced into an increasingly didactic role with children like Gabe. In all likelihood I can get Gabe to develop these skills, but at what cost?

I am thankful to Gidseg for shining a spotlight on this struggle, and for sticking with the fight. We need experienced teacher such as him, working with our youngest children. More and more experienced early childhood teachers, who know what is possible and what is right, are leaving the profession heart-broken. They take with them decades of experience and deep knowledge about how to create environments where young children thrive and learn and grow – and want to be.

The third great find comes from the US Play Coalition, and the announcement that registration is now open for The Conference on the Value of Play set to take place at Clemson University February 6th – 9th:

The Conference on the Value of Play will emphasize the health and educational implications of play while still focusing on the role of parks and recreation in facilitating play for all. We are thrilled to have Dr. Joe Frost, Parker Centennial Professor Emeritus from the University of Texas, serving as the Honorary Chair of the Program Committee for The Conference on the Value of Play. Dr. Frost and the program committee are working to create a program that will include nationally acclaimed keynote speakers who will address the role of play in facilitating physical and emotional health, cognitive and educational success, and overall quality of life for people of all ages.

There you have it…three great finds for the fight to protect play. If you know of others, please send them this way!