The Kids are Alright by Mrs. Kirsten Howard
(Kirsten Lee Howard is a 3s teacher, Educator of Educators, Mother of two elementary school age kids, and beloved member of the ACPS Community)
Hi.
We see you.
We see you worrying about this year: about older children going back to school virtually or in person, worrying about your patience level, worrying about how you will manage working and supporting your children, worrying about how to plan for something that is entirely un-plan-for-able.
Breathe.
They are doing just fine. You are doing just fine.
It’s hard to feel a sense of control in the middle of a global pandemic. It’s hard to feel a sense of control in the middle of so many things we cannot control, but we promise:
The kids are alright.
To our returning families: you’ve seen the beauty of uninterrupted outdoor play, you’ve seen why our preschoolers have an hour or more at the beginning of the day to play in the classroom. To our new families: you chose a play based program for a reason. Tom Hobson says, “Play and hard work are not opposites. In fact, they can be seen as synonyms.” (Tom Hobson, 2017).
Children are resilient, capable, and clever. In the coming months, some skills may regress a bit, but that’s an entirely normal developmental trajectory. It would happen whether they were in preschool or not. When humans are working on something new, other skills can plateau or regress (remember when your child was learning to crawl or walk or clap and they completely forgot how to feed themselves? Or they stopped napping for a week?). Are you ever in the middle of doing or creating something difficult and you forget how to spell the simplest word? Totally normal.
You are doing just fine. They are doing just fine.
Children play because that’s how they make sense of the world. Children play because it is how they learn. Children play because it’s fun and interesting and hard.
So all the play that you are making space for now is exactly what they need.
You are exactly what they need.
Lisa Murphy, an early childhood specialist and champion of young children has identified seven things that children need to be able to do in their play. She proposes that children need the opportunity every day to: create, move, sing, discuss, observe, read, and play. (Lisa Murphy, 2020)
Here is a small sample of what our children are learning as they play:
Outside Play:
Climbing, jumping, running, swinging, spinning, stomping, riding scooters and bikes: all of these movements help children build their proprioception, or their sense of body awareness and where they are in space and in relation to other people and things. (Connell and McCarthy, 2014)
Digging, cutting grass, pulling leaves, mixing: this builds their fine and gross motor muscles that eventually allow them to hold writing implements and form shapes, lines, and letters.
Play-dough, kinetic sand, water/sand/rice and other sensory play:
When children are engaged in sensory play they might be: squeezing, cutting, rolling, patting, pouring. They are learning to use less or more pressure to achieve different goals.
They are practicing dealing with disappointment or frustration when something doesn’t go their way or breaks. They are learning resilience and perseverance to try again.
Magnetic tiles, blocks, other building tools:
Children are testing physics – how tall can you build something before it falls, what sorts of bases do you need to hold something taller, how do shapes fit together?
Just like other types of play, they are practicing dealing with disappointment or frustration when something doesn’t go their way or breaks. They are learning resilience and perseverance to try again.
Table and stand up work:
The art and other creative work many children enjoy allows practice with so many things: cutting, gluing, squeezing, taking off and placing stickers. These all allow practice and strengthening of the small motor muscles in children’s hands, wrists and forearms.
Painting at an easel, or paper taped on a wall (or painting with water on a fence outside) brings their larger body into it and allows them to cross the left-to-right and sometimes the top-to-bottom midline. Midlines are invisible, but are an important part of development that allows children to learn to isolate body parts for movement, while also learning to coordinate parts of the body to work together. Crossing midlines help make connections between brain hemispheres and allow for further development. (Connell and McCarthy, 2014)
In creative and artistic play, they are practicing dealing with disappointment or frustration when something doesn’t go as planned. They are learning resilience and perseverance to try again. (Have you noticed a theme here?)
Pretend and dramatic play:
As children imagine and create their world, they are building language skills as their characters talk to each other (ie, Duplo people, Octonauts characters), or they talk to playmates as they play act what’s happening. They are building social emotional skills as they notice how others are feeling, and feel those big feelings themselves. They are exploring, making sense of, and digging into fantasy and imagination.
Just like other types of play, they are practicing dealing with disappointment or frustration when something doesn’t go as planned. They are learning resilience and perseverance to try again.
Many early childhood professionals know there is magic in the open-ended time we give children: in the first fifteen minutes they set up and figure out what they’re doing, the second fifteen minutes brings the conflict, and the next fifteen minutes is where the magic happens. All that navigation and debate and planning is part of their play. It’s building their prefrontal cortex where they plan, it’s building language skills where they explain what they’re doing and direct others or argue; it’s building imagination as they turn a shovel into a mighty wand.
So give them that time. Give them the chance to be bored; boredom breeds invention.
The kids are alright.
And so are you.
* * *
Resources:
Connell, Gill and Cheryl McCarthy. A Moving Child is a Learning Child. Free Spirit Publishing, 2014.
Hobson, Tom. Teacher Tom’s First Book. Peanut Butter Publishing, 2017.
Murphy, Lisa. Lisa Murphy on Being Child Centered. Redleaf Press, 2020.
