How do kids learn

How Children Learn - Alternatives to School

If you have ever watched a child grow from birth up to “school age,” you know the statement above is true. Children come into the world with powerful educative instincts, which include their natural curiosity, playfulness, sociability, attentiveness to the activities around them, desire to grow up, and desire to do what older children and adults can do.

Through their own efforts, with essentially no instruction, children learn to walk, run, jump, and climb. They learn from scratch their native language, and with that they learn to assert their will, argue, amuse, annoy, befriend, charm, and ask questions. Through watching, listening, questioning, and in other ways exploring, they acquire an enormous amount of knowledge about the physical and social world around them. And in their play, they continuously practice skills that promote their physical, intellectual, social and emotional development.

They do all this before anyone, in any systematic way, tries to teach them anything! This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn five or six. We turn it off with our system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of this schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.In this section, you can learn more about, and find evidence concerning, young people’s natural ways of learning and how adults can help them by providing appropriate conditions. Just click on the tabs that interest you most.

• How Children Educated Themselves Before Schools Existed This examines the foundations of children’s educative instincts, the adaptability of those instincts, and the conditions under which they might operate best in our culture.

• Evidence that Children Today Can Educate Themselves Wonderfully, Given Appropriate Conditions  Children’s educative instincts can work beautifully in our culture today. We don’t need to force children to learn; all we need to do is provide the conditions that allow children to educate themselves. This section presents the research evidence behind these claims and describes the conditions that optimize children’s abilities to educate themselves in and for the modern world. These are conditions that are almost diametrically opposite to the conditions in our schools.

• Why Free Play Is Essential to Children’s Healthy Social, Emotional, and Intellectual Development Over the past 50 or 60 years in the United States, as schooling and other adult-directed activities have usurped ever more of children’s free time, children’s opportunities to play freely with other children have continuously declined. This decline in play has been accompanied by a well-documented rise in childhood anxiety, depression, and suicide; a decline in children’s sense of control over their own lives; a decline in empathy and rise in narcissism, and a decline in creativity. This section explains why play deprivation would be expected to have such negative effects.

For a full, documented account of children’s instincts for self-education and how they work, see Peter Gray’s Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.

From a broad, biological perspective, education is cultural transmission. It is the process by which each new generation of human beings acquires and builds upon the skills, knowledge, lore, beliefs, and values of the previous generation. Education has been key to our survival for as long as we have been human beings. The drives and instincts for it are built into our DNA.

Before the development of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago or so (a speck of time from a biological perspective), we were all hunter-gatherers. Our basic human instincts, including our educative instincts, evolved in the context of the hunter-gatherer way of life. Some hunter-gatherer cultures, in various isolated parts of the world, have survived with their traditional ways into modern times and have been studied by anthropologists. In all of these cultures, children and even adolescents are afforded essentially unlimited time to play, explore, and in other ways pursue their own interests, as the adults understand that this is how young people learn what they must to become effective adults. These three articles, published in academic journals, document and elaborate on this finding.

• The value of a play-filled childhood in development of the hunter-gatherer individual
• The evolutionary biology of education: How our hunter-gatherer educative instincts could form the basis for education today
• Play as a foundation for hunter-gatherer social existence

Peter Gray: Mother Nature’s Pedagogy: Insights from Evolutionary Psychology.

When young people in our culture are granted the freedom and opportunity to educate themselves, outside of the boundaries of traditional school, they generally do so fully and joyfully. Through their everyday engagement with life, and especially through their free play and exploration, they acquire the skills, knowledge and values needed for success in our culture. The following books, articles and essays document and describe children’s and adolescents’ capacities for self-education in today’s world.

Books About Children’s Natural Learning [The books by Neill and Holt are classics.]

• Peter Gray. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life
• A.S. Neill. Summerhill
• John Holt. How Children Learn
• John Holt. How Children Fail

Follow-up Studies of People Who Took Self-Educational Paths

• P. Gray and D. Chanoff. Democratic schooling: What happens to young people who have charge of their own education?
• D. Greenberg, M. Sadofsky, and J. Lempka. The Pursuit of Happiness: The Lives of Sudbury Valley Alumni.
• P. Gray.  A Survey of Grown Unschoolers I: Overview of Findings.
• Idzie Desmarais.  Blogs, Interviews, & Other Writing by Grown Unschoolers.

Some Academic Articles about Children’s Abilities to Educate Themselves

• Sugata Mitra. Minimally invasive education: A progress report on the ‘hole-in-the-wall’ experiments.
• P. Gray. The special value of age-mixed play.
• P. Gray. Playing in the Zone of Proximal Development: Qualities of Self-Directed Age Mixing Between Adolescents and Young Children at a Democratic School.

Sample of essays from the “Freedom to Learn” Blog on PsychologyToday.com

• Children Educate Themselves I: Outline of Some of the Evidence
• Children Educate Themselves II: We All Know That’s True for Little Kids
• Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers
• Children Educate Themselves IV: Lessons from Sudbury Valley
• The Natural Environment for Children’s Self-Education: How The Sudbury Valley School is Like a Hunter-Gatherer Band
• Children Teach Themselves to Read
• Kids Learn Math Easily When They Control Their Own Learning
• Minimally Invasive Education: Lessons from India
• Can You Measure an Education? Can You Define Life’s Meaning?
• Experiences of ADHD-Labeled Kids Who Switch from Conventional Schooling to Homeschooling or Unschooling
• The Value of Play I: The Definition of Play Provides Clues to Its Purposes
• The Value of Play II: How Play Promotes Reasoning in Children and Adults
• The Varieties of Play Match the Requirements of Human Existence

Video discussing natural learning in children:

The young of all mammals play, especially in ways that promote the skills they must develop to survive. Research has shown that when young animals are deliberately deprived of play during their development, they grow up emotionally and socially crippled.

Human children have much more to learn than do the young of other mammals. It is not surprising, therefore, that, when free to do so, our children play much more—and over many more years—than do the young of other mammals. Children play not just at skills that are valuable for all people everywhere (such as two-legged walking and running), but also at skills that are uniquely valuable in the culture in which they are developing (such as reading, writing and computing, in our culture). Children’s play also involves continuous exercise in imagination, which underlies all higher-order human thought. Play is especially valuable educationally when it is age-mixed. Young children acquire advanced skills and knowledge through observing and interacting with older ones, and older children acquire nurturing skills and a sense of their own maturity through interacting with younger ones.

The articles and essays listed below describe the many things that children learn in free play, undirected by adults, and the harm that can occur when children are deprived of such play, as happens altogether too often in our culture today.

Academic articles

P. Gray. The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in childhood and adolescence.

Articles from the “Freedom to Learn” Blog at PsychologyToday.com

• The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders
• Free Play Is Essential for Normal Emotional Development
• How Children Learn Bravery in an Age of Overprotection
• As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity
• Unsolicited Evaluation Is the Enemy of Creativity
• The Many Benefits, for Kids, of Playing Video Games
• Some Lessons Taught by Informal Sports, Not by Formal Sports
• The Morally Questionable Lessons of Formal Sports
• Play Makes Us Human I: A Ludic Theory of Human Nature
• Social Play and the Genesis of Democracy
• The Value of Play I: The Definition of Play Gives Insights into Its Functions
• The Value of Play II: How Play Promotes Reasoning
• Value of Play III: How Children Confront Life’s Challenges
• The Value of Play IV: Nature’s Way of Teaching Us New Skills
• The Varieties of Play Match Requirements of Human Existence
• How to Ruin Children’s Play: Supervise, Praise, Intervene
• Chasing Games and Sports: Why Do We Like to Be Chased?
• The Value of Play in the Zone of Proximal Development
• The Unique Educative Qualities of Age-Mixed Play
• Risky Play:  Why Children Love It and Need It

The Decline of Play – TEDx talk by Peter Gray

How Do Children Learn Through Play?

As an adult, Albert Einstein remembered a pivotal event in his life that inspired his interest in scientific discovery. He was four or five years old and stuck in bed with a childhood illness when his father handed him a magnetic pocket compass to play with. He spend hour twisting the compass, wondering how the needle always knew to point towards the north.

The book Internet Invention: From Literacy to Electracy , quotes Albert Einstein on how playing with that compass inspired his love of science. "I can still remember," he wrote, "that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things."

As a parent, you probably love to see your child playing. It’s incredible to hear their ideas and to learn about the new worlds they create. It’s also fun to see how creative they can be as they put their imagination to use in learning about the world around them.

Play is far more powerful for children, however, than many parents realize. It’s actually the key to learning. Researchers and educators across the world have found that play can help enrich learning and develop key skills such as inquiry, expression, experimentation, and teamwork.

Schools that use the Montessori education focus on encouraging children to learn through “meaningful play.” According to the book, From Play to Practice: Connecting Teachers' Play to Children's Learning, “meaningful play” has five characteristics. It:

1. Gives the child a choice about what he or she wants to do
2. Feels fun and enjoyable for the child
3. Evolves spontaneously, rather than giving kids a script to follow
4. Is driven by intrinsic motivation about what the child wants to do
5. Creates a risk-free environment where kids can experiment and try new ideas.

In meaningful play, children are active participants. For example, instead of passively taking in a lesson, children take on roles alongside their peers and respond to the other children according to the rules of play that they’ve created.

While “rules” may seem counterintuitive to the idea of free, voluntary play, a system of mental rules is actually one of the other key features of play. Children may state these explicitly, form them collaboratively or follow a selected leader, or have an inherent sense of what governs the terms of their playful engagement. This active, pleasurable negotiation of rules and symbols can offer a number of learning benefits.

How Do Children Learn Through Play?

In her TedX Talk talk, Professor Doris Fromberg, Director of Early Childhood Teacher Education at Hofstra University, explains why play is such an important part of the learning process for children.

We need to consider that young children learn in quite different ways [than adults]. They learn by comparing physical experiences, by interactions with other people and their own feelings. And they learn an enormous amount through their imagination.... Play is what pulls together the logical and creative parts of the brain.

For young children, play is often a full body activity that helps them develop skills they will need later in life. Running, dancing, climbing, rolling—these activities all foster muscle development and help fine-tune motor skills. Children also build their mental and emotional muscles as they create elaborate, imaginative worlds rich with a system of rules that govern the terms of play.

University of Denver researchers Elena Bodrova, Carrie Germeroth, and Deborah J. Leong found that children teach themselves to regulate their emotions and think before they act when they play. For example, if a child is pretending to be Olaf from Frozen, they may pretend they’re melting when they come inside or insist that they like warm hugs. In each case, they consider how their actions will correlate with how Olaf should act in a given situation.

This role playing helps children build social skills and helps them become the kind of adults who are able to thrive in a range of personal and professional environments.

Why It’s Important to Include Play in the Classroom

In an academic setting, play can also help children learn and grow. Teacher-initiated play is a close cousin to inquiry based learning. At Whitby, our early child educators ask children questions about the rules and process that govern the play, and then encourage children to make connections to the wider world through their own body of knowledge.

Dr. Angeline S. Lillard, author of Montessori: The Science behind the Genius, wrote about about how Maria Montessori encouraged educators to use play as a part of the learning process.

[In a Montessori classroom] teachers guide learning within structures but do so playfully and loosely, with particular focus on the goals they have in mind... the Montessori education resembles playful learning.

We’ve seen this at Whitby. When we take a play-based approach to combining different subjects, we’ve found that teachers can create an educational experience greater than the sum of its parts. Students learn critical thinking skills, develop their language abilities, expand their range of knowledge and increase their social emotional awareness—all without realizing how much they’re learning.

Maximize Learning Through Play

From offering children a chance to ask questions, problem solve, work collaboratively and conduct structured experimentation, play is a key component of learning at Whitby. One way that Whitby teachers bring a sense of play into the classroom is by taking an activity-based approach to nearly every subject.

For example, when our teachers read a book aloud, they encourage young students to turn each page and follow each word with their fingers. They can also prompt students to talk to each other about the content, and to talk about the associations it sparks from their own lives. Teachers also engage kids’ imaginations and sense of curiosity by asking “What do you think will happen next?”

Students are also given an opportunity to bring stories to life through dramatic play. When children are given opportunities to act out scenes and express themselves, they improve their social confidence, increase their ability to see the perspectives of others and increase the attention they give to the literature.

Play gives children a chance to practice what they’re learning.
- Fred Rogers

At Whitby, we seek to teach children that learning is not just a formal activity they do in the classroom—it’s actually a lot of fun! One of our goals is to give kids opportunities to wonder, question, work as a team, experiment, play with different possibilities and investigate subjects that interest them. For example, in our 3D printing class, educators give students the opportunity to design an object from their imagination. Then they ask students to explain, “Why did you make that?” “What did you make it out of? What is the purpose of that object?”

This teacher engagement supports children in their creativity, while also challenging them to think about why they chose to create an object. It also requires them to think through the challenges they solved in creating it and helps them become more confident in their problem solving abilities.

Help Your Child Learn Through Play

Our goal at Whitby is to help students learn to ask questions, express themselves, collaborate with others, and take creative risks. We also want them to retain their natural curiosity and to never lose the excitement of learning something new. All those things are achieved by making learning fun for children.

Find out more about how you can help your child learn during our upcoming Parents as Partners parenting classes. We will be presenting on “Play as a Powerful Learning Tool” on Thursday, March 17. Click the link below to attend.

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The schedule is affected by the number of students in the school

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If the second shift in schools today surprises few people, then the third shift causes confusion among many. And first of all - at parents . Moms and dads of primary school students are especially outraged: because of such an inconvenient schedule, children have to do homework without the help of adults. NGS found the mothers of two Novosibirsk schoolchildren who spoke about the difficulties of the third shift. nine0090