They build Lego block towers and fiddle with Play-Doh.
They serve up plastic steaks and plastic fruit in miniature kitchens.
They tinker with pattern blocks, stick faces on Mr. Potato Heads and put on puppet shows.
And when it comes time for recess, they spill out onto the playground to test themselves on the monkey bars, to run like a stampeding herd of bison after a wayward tennis ball or to cluster in a huddle around a tree that, depending on the day, may be a place that belongs only to the girls.
Play — in all its various iterations — is an essential component of kindergarten. And though it is sometimes criticized by pennywise critics who question the value of taxpayer-funded classrooms for young children, educators and scholars say play is the language kindergartners know best, making it a great tool for learning.
At Indianapolis Public School 61, kindergartners hear stories. They practice writing their letters. They work on their numbers. But they also get time to play. And it is amid the block towers and the playground games that teachers here say some essential learning takes place.
Teacher Carolyn Kendall makes time for her kindergarten students to play a couple of times per day, not to mention recess. She looks at a boy stacking blocks and sees a child whose hand muscles are getting a workout. She looks at a little girl sorting colored animals into lines and sees a child learning early math concepts. And, out on the playground, when she watches her students forming teams and enforcing their own playground rules, she sees a society in miniature — building relationships, learning to get along.
Teacher Shirley Chappell says play, in children so young, is intimately connected with learning. Watching her students climb like ants on the jungle gym, she sees children whose hands and arms are getting a workout that strengthens them for the skill of writing, and tests eye-hand coordination that aids in reading. She also sees children, many of them from apartment complexes where it is not always safe to send children outside, exercising, enjoying fresh air and getting a chance to grow in ways only the playground can teach.
“For some of these kids,” Chappell said, “this is the only outside time they get.”
Indiana University early education Professor Mary Benson McMullen sees two kinds of play at work in schools: the kind of directed play teachers use to teach specific skills and the kind of unscripted free play that children choose. Both, she says, are very important to the development of young children. But she says the importance of free play shouldn’t be underestimated.
“People, from the very beginning, need to learn how to get along together,” she said. “That is one of the fundamentals of kindergarten. And you do that by sharing toys and by sharing experiences and making up rules together that you can all live with.”
Yet in recent years, as schools are pressured to ace standardized tests, recess and playtime have been squeezed out of daily school schedules for more “academic” pursuits. To take away playtime from a 5-year-old, McMullen said, schools might as well take away lunch. It’s that essential to learning.
“Brain research shows that if we enjoy something, positive emotion helps build those neural pathways a lot,” she said. And, she said, it does so “more quickly, more strongly than something that is boring, something that has a negative emotion.”
To people in the blogosphere and in legislative circles who are skeptical of the value of play as a learning tool — to those who might look at kindergarten and say the children spend too much time playing — McMullen is unapologetic:
“I would say, ‘Thank goodness. I hope they are.’ “
