Our Developmental Approach to Early Childhood Education
There’s a debate raging in traditional education circles over the purpose and content of early childhood education. With pressure from high-stakes testing and national education standards focused exclusively on reading and math, preschool and kindergarten (early childhood) have become more and more academic over the past several decades. Kids are being asked to sit at desks and focus on academic work for longer and longer sessions, at the expense of more active play and creativity-based activities that used to be the core of early childhood education in all school systems. There are several major problems with this approach, all of which center around child development.
Bringing Academics Too Early Isn’t Effective
One of the main problems with forcing academics earlier and earlier is that it isn't effective. Children end up working harder but learning less. This approach doesn’t take into account the developmental stages of children. For example, children at this age have a very short attention span and lots of energy. Asking them to sit still and focus for long periods of time is a recipe for failure, as many of them won’t be able to do it. Children at that age (especially) learn in tactile and multi-sensory ways. They experiment, they explore, they build, they touch, and engage as many of their senses as they can in playful exploratory learning. That’s a very different picture compared to the kind of concentrated desk and bookwork they are being asked to do more these days. Comparative studies of intensive academics in early childhood show that there are some gains in test scores, but that those academic gains disappear in 1-3 years, and in some studies even reversed themselves later on.
Bringing Academics too Early has Negative Consequences
What are the consequences of bringing academic pressure at a developmentally inappropriate age?
“I’ve been a teacher for over 20 years. Kindergarten has sadly changed over that time. It feels more and more like first grade. It used to be play-oriented, but now it’s become much more high pressure. It’s heartbreaking to see many kids struggling with their self esteem so early in their life. Some children struggle with the standardized testing and become anxious and fall into learned helplessness. They shut down and are unable to do anything themselves. Also, the children become aware that they can’t keep up with the other children and they will say things like “I’m the stupidest child in the class”. All of these things can be a big hit on their self-confidence that can have a long term impact on their success in school and beyond.”
Melanie W. | Connecticut Public School Teacher
Children losing (or never developing) their love of learning.
Children feeling like (or being told that they are) failures, because they can’t do something that isn’t developmentally appropriate for them yet.
Children who have been shown to have more energy than endurance athletes are being asked to sit still and focus, causing them to be fidgety, unfocused, and act out.
Children can miss out on developing important social and emotional skills.
Boys and Girls develop at different rates and in different ways. Bringing academic work too early is especially problematic for young boys.
Foundational Pre-Academic Skills are Very Important and Shouldn’t be Crowded Out.
Forcing academic work too early can be harmful as it can usurp foundational pre-academic skill-building that children need for future school success. Some children can and do learn to read and do math without these pre-academic skills. Having these skills in place however, helps students who would otherwise struggle and helps academic skills come more easily and more joyfully for all students. Hearing stories, whether read out loud or told by their teacher are great examples of pre-academic skill-building activities. Singing and reciting verses and poems helps with language skills. Stories help children develop their memory and attention, learn new words and sounds, and nurture curiosity and love of learning, which are all very important steps towards reading and writing. Playing with and manipulating natural materials, cooking, building, etc are all steps towards expanding numeracy and early mathematical skills. This exploratory play also helps children with fine motor skills, which will later aid them with holding a pencil and learning how to write. The children have important (and joyful) work to do in these early years to prepare them for grade school learning, but it must be brought at the right developmental time.
Social/Emotional Skills and Executive Functioning Skills Aren’t Best Learned at a Desk.
Two crucial sets of skills that are important for a child's success in academic learning and beyond but aren’t easily learned in academic settings are social and emotional skills (self-awareness of the child's strengths and challenges, self-management of emotions and behaviors, responsible decision-making, social awareness and empathy towards others, and relationship skills like sharing and conflict resolution) as well as the overlapping set of executive functioning skills (planning and prioritizing, self-organization, self-motivation, impulse control, self-control, flexible thinking to adapt to evolving situations, and working memory). Interestingly, these skills originate through play, especially self directed play. Free play lets kids set their own goals, and work towards them through negotiating and resolving conflicts with their peers by making decisions, solving problems, and engaging with complex and evolving situations. When a bookwork and academic heavy approach to early childhood education takes over, self-directed free play and outdoor time get replaced. This can cause academic and behavioral problems later on that often require additional support. A long-running study of multiple approaches to early childhood education found that children's programs that emphasized play and socialization over academics showed no differences in academic achievement later in life. However, children in the play and socialization-based program went on to have significantly fewer emotional and behavioral issues later in life than their peers in the academic-focused program.
We offer a different approach, rooted in child development.
Our approach to early childhood differs from the direction that traditional education is moving. Our play and nature-based approach to early childhood recognizes the crucial “work” that children are doing through play. We know that developmentally, they need to be working on crucial pre-academic social, emotional, and executive functioning skills. This way they can enter the grades and be ready for more formal academics. Our early childhood students (nursery and kindergarten) learn the importance of rhythm through a day of balance and structure. They develop their gross and fine motor skills through their time spent outdoors in nature and through imitation from our teachers who model nurturing activities and meaningful work like gardening, cooking, cleaning, and baking. They develop their curiosity and creativity through imaginative play. They work on their language skills through songs and poems and stories. Our goal is to develop their love of learning to enter 1st grade curious, confident, and ready to learn.