Seeing the World From a Child's Perspective: The Incredible Benefits of Play

"Adultification is the failure to see the world from a child’s perspective."

“Being little” is of critical importance because we see the signature of early childhood experience literally in people’s bodies: their life expectancies are longer and their social-emotional capabilities are more robust when they have a chance to learn through play and through deep relationships, and when their developing brains are given the chance to grow in a nurturing, language-rich, and relatively unhurried environment. It’s clearer than ever before that young children are not simply mini-adults." - Emily Kaplan

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It is tempting to see the world of children through adult eyes - after all, we are older, wiser, better prepared to protect them from all the known and unknown uncertainties that might invade their young lives - plus, we are the keepers of the keys (for driving), the vaults (for purchasing) and the pantries (for nourishment) so we carry a lot of influence around the smaller versions of humanity.

We think we know what is best for them, what will help them grow and thrive in the long term, what they 'need' to succeed in living and in life.

The truth, however, is far different from what we think as adults. The truth is that we should be trying to see the world through the eyes of the children, not the adults. We have already learned the 'how and why' of the world, already experienced joys and sorrows, rejection and loss, already not counted ourselves 'good enough' at particular games or activities. 

We are well-insulated from experiencing the world first hand and with wonder; as adults, we are great anticipators and we pride ourselves on 'knowing' the outcome of a situation even before it happens, based on our previous experiences. Most importantly, we know about 'time' and that it is quickly running out on us so we must ensure our children have all the experiences in life they need before 'time' runs out on them as well.

Except that 'time' as we think of it was envisioned by adults and is managed by adults. For children, time is defined by adults and mostly never passes too quickly or too slowly - unless an adult has noted that particularly unfathomable phenomenon!

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"...we’re in danger of losing the child in childhood. The notion that there is something of value in being a little kid—with little kid desires and, above all, needs—seems to have fallen out of favor. We talk about young children, increasingly, as commodities to “invest” in for future payoffs. Parents express enormous anxiety about their children’s futures, and seem to be curating their children’s life experiences in a way that would look quite unnatural and even rather joyless to previous generations." - Emily Kaplan 

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Especially in schools, we need to remember the world we are a part of has been intentionally developed to acknowledge and meet the learning needs of children. If we continually approach all learning from an adult perspective, our interactions will become adult-focused as well, interrupting the natural paths of learning children are hard-wired to be an integral part of all the time. They need to experience interactions where imagination, collaborative dreaming, pretending and posing questions is considered to be perfectly okay and worthwhile. 

We must hold the child at the front of all our decisions, our plans, our ideas for facilitating and supporting learning. 

Learning spaces need to be designed with children in mind - how will they move? climb? play? imagine? engage in cooperative play? solve a problem? How will they sit? stand? jump? lie on their tummies? What makes them happy, sad, tired, revived? How do we design multi-functional learning spaces that meet the learning and physical needs of all? 

Additionally, the learning engagements and activities the children will be engaged with must be considered as part of the whole educational experiences. If we want children to take risks with their thinking, they need to first take risks with their doing - find their 'brave' and try it on. Children are much more inclined to do something active than listen passively and understand. They hear with their ears but they learn with their whole bodies.

Children learn by doing, building relationships through shared activities and demonstrating their own abilities for finding their way in the world. Whether they are thinkers, jumpers, doers, climbers, assemblers, designers or any other kind of learner, they are constantly processing and assessing their deep understandings of the world as they know it, and how it works.

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"Play is the defining feature of mammalian development: the impulse is hardwired into us and can’t be suppressed. However, it’s crucial that we recognize that while the play impulse is one thing, the play know-how—the nuts and bolts of playing—is not always so natural, and requires careful cultivation." - Emily Kaplan

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Our current Kindergarten program is a play-based program, with the intention that children will learn to do many things through play - develop social skills, knowledge and awareness of their community and each other, begin to understand concepts of print and basic math, engage with basic science and environmental concepts and become familiar with the routines of school and collegial interactions. As they create and imagine, playing together through much of their school day, the value of play is clearly demonstrated through the language they use with each other, the physical movements they use to accommodate each other in the room and in games, the smiles and encouragement they offer to each other when something is a little tougher than they anticipated. There are always offers to help in Kindergarten - I think of it as the place where the growth and development of the first five years begins to encounter the social structures that will guide them appropriately through the rest of their lives. 

"All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" (Robert Fulghum) was a popular book in the 1990's that still holds true today - and we learned all those things - like sharing, playing fairly, say you're sorry when you hit someone, clean up after yourself - through the medium of play. Seeing the world from a child's perspective allows the Kindergarten year in school to offer multiple opportunities to 'try out' new skills and understandings without pressure and overt assessment. I consider it be an indispensable part of our education system and believe we have many lessons to learn, as educators, about the value of play from children's experiences in Kindergarten. 

Kindergarten programs offer both structured and unstructured play times - always with the understanding and intention that children will use these times to coalesce their perceptions and appreciations of interacting with others in specific situations. Organized learning times throughout the rest of a child's educational experiences will - ideally - continue to offer structured play-like opportunities infused throughout the learning day. 

When learners engage in maker space activities, art, drama, music, science, social studies, reading, writing, math or any other academic pursuit, there are always numerous opportunities for children to learn through playful activities that will both enhance their skills and knowledge as well as their social interactions, creativity, imagination, physical movements and collegial communication. The value of play in school cannot be overstated - most adults prefer to be playful with their work when possible and most of us definitely prefer our hobbies and fun pursuits over going to work. Play is where we find our joy most often - and play can make learning in school more joyful too!

Unstructured play has enormous value, as well, for both children and adults. While organized sports certainly offer significant opportunities for children to learn to play collegially, follow rules, acquire specific skills and strategies and understand the boundaries of structured team sports, unstructured play offers students unlimited opportunities to think creatively, imagine without boundaries and engage in both physical and mental 'stretching' that will carry through into future learning situations. Unstructured play offers children opportunities to pretend without concern about meeting specific requirements and this kind of play is invaluable for promoting unconventional thinking that will serve to stretch the boundaries of conventional thinking in educational settings.

It is at the intersection of unconventional and conventional thinking that the dreamers, inventors, designers, writers, poets, musicians, artists all find their ways to push social considerations and thinking continually forward in our thinking, our doing and our evolving as a society. 

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"The physical exercise and emotional stretching that children enjoy in unorganized play is more varied and less time-bound than is found in organized sports. 

Play-time - especially unstructured, imaginative, exploratory play - is increasingly recognized as an essential component of wholesome child development." - Richard Louv (Author, 'Last Child in the Woods')

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There is no doubt that play is something we need to sustain and hold in the front of our minds as we plan for learning in our schools, for it is play that will shape the lives of our children forever.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School 

 

Why we Need to Personalize Learning for Our Students - Especially in 2022!

 

"Every student is unique, with different learning styles, 

strengths, and areas of growth. 

Personalized learning encourages and challenges 

students to achieve their best.

 It is not a one-size-fits-all approach. 

Instead, personalized learning customizes 

activities to align with each student’s strengths, 

needs, and interests." - Sandy Sutty, Sanford University (2018)

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As we are attempting to either live with various iterations of the COVID-19 virus - or to be hopeful it is fading into oblivion - schools are, of necessity, continuing to consider how to best meet the needs of our learners every day, as we have through the past two years' pandemic constrained living. Regardless of our beliefs, wishes, hopes related to the impact of the virus itself, children show up to learn and, as teachers, we are doing our very best to make professional judgements and decisions that will benefit each child to maximize their possibilities for learning.

There are numerous ways to approach teaching and learning on a daily basis in classrooms. Probably the one I knew best prior to becoming a teacher was the one-instruction-for-all  model I experienced as a student myself. 

My teachers planned daily lessons and taught them to all of us each class every day - sometimes there were activities to do as well as the more 'academic' pursuits of reading, answering questions, calculating mathematical problems, completing worksheets, writing tests. I do not remember any diversity in teaching, all the students in every class from Kindergarten through to grade 12 were taught the same lessons and we either understood and could represent those understandings on tests and worksheets or answering questions and writing essays - or we did not. 

Those who did not ultimately left school early and pursued other interests. Learning came easily to me and I came from an academically-inclined family who introduced me early to the public library, museums, historical and biological institutions so I was able to experience success in school. Approximately 60% of the students I started Kindergarten with in my small Nova Scotia community graduated from high school together, and perhaps 25% pursued opportunities in higher education. I have not gone back and researched whether this was a typical graduating rate for the time; I do know for the three years my sisters and I were in school, this was a typical graduating rate.

One-instruction-for-all clearly did not serve everyone well.

32 years as part of the education profession has offered me numerous opportunities to both implement and observe other approaches to teaching and learning, including using a whole language approach, a balanced approach, a centres approach, self-guided approach,  digital approach, hybrid approach, research approach - among several other approaches. Every approach has been implemented with the best of attentions: to improve access for learners to the knowledge, skills and strategies associated with the various subject areas and enhance student success and improve achievement. 

A few years ago, we began to hear about personalized learning - or the practice of determining teaching and learning practices that are tailored to reflect individual needs, strengths and interests of each student to maximize their engagement in learning and, therefore improve their opportunities to be successful as a learner in school.

Personalized learning does not require writing a separate lesson plan for every student - many learners are able to engage in a wide variety of activities that are quite similar to each other as long as students are able to approach it from their own area of strength first. For example, if a child is not an auditory learner first, engaging them in a visual or hands-on initial task will help them grasp a new concept before being asked to listen and respond or participate in a conversation about that concept prior to truly understanding the meaning of the new idea. 

Personalizing tasks for learners takes a bit of preparation for sure, on the part of teachers. There are multiple strategies for personalizing tasks, including considering visual/auditory/kinesthetic approaches to similar tasks or learnings as well as tasks that are highly adapted using digital tools, specific manipulatives to support specific student challenges. In a somewhat typical classroom, personalizing tasks that require significant adaptations are usually needed for one or two students while personalizing through the three lenses of auditory/visual/kinesthetic will meet different needs of many learners.

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"One challenge with schooling is that teachers want students to focus on the curriculum they’ve chosen, and students have other interests and concerns that lead them to daydream or disrupt instruction... about half of our students in grades 5-12 are engaged with their learning.  About a quarter are passively disengaged, and another quarter are actively disengaged." - Dennis Shirley (5 Paths of Student Engagement)

Personalizing learning really gets to the heart of student engagement. Knowing how learners best connect with understanding and appreciating new ideas is immensely valuable knowledge for teachers to have about their learners to facilitate active learning all day long - there should not be gaps in the day where students are simply not paying attention or learning anything new because they have lost interest.

Teachers weave learning opportunities carefully for their learners, acknowledging their differentiated learning needs while also embracing student interests, motivating activities such as music or art and empowering learners with active learning tasks that provoke their thinking and energize them to pursue new understandings through the lenses (visual/auditory/kinesthetic) that appeal to them the most effectively.

Differentiating learning through the teaching day so it is personalized to the needs of students is not difficult or unusual. It is what meets the needs of learners' best to advance their opportunities for success. We cannot devolve to one-instruction-for-all when we know so much more about designing engaging and effective learning for our learners. 

Personalizing learning elevates the need to know and appreciate our students as individuals with needs we are capable of meeting every day in classrooms. To do less is to deny what we know to be true about children as well as about teaching. 

And in 2022, as we are trying to navigate a social climate that is simply impossible to clearly understand, our learners warrant all the individualized attention and support we are able to offer - this is not only a new social climate for them, it is the only one they have ever known or navigated as a learner. They deserve our best opportunities for learning in every situation, all day, every day if we are to generate enthusiasm for learning and promote life-long learning in what is certainly a precarious social circumstance.

Schools are consistently places where kids land and seek affirmations of worth and viability. Personalized learning offers educators the strategies to ensure they are affirmed capable and ready to engage in learning every day.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal 

Eric Harvie School