#KINDERGARTEN 2 GAME CREATION FAILURE FREE#

Kindergarten teachers found themselves becoming less like relationship builders and more like what Erica Christakis (2016) called “carnival barkers” spitting out prescribed lessons. Rigid teaching practices soon trickled down into preschool and kindergarten classrooms, replacing playful, child-initiated activities with more time at desks with pencil-and-paper tasks and resulting in kindergarten looking more like “the new first grade” (Miller & Almon 2009 Bassok, Latham, & Rorem 2016, 2). 2003 Hannaway & Hamilton 2008) and accountability and high-stakes testing increased (Ravitch 2010).

With a recognition that early childhood is key to later academic achievement, early reading and math were heavily emphasized in the primary grades (Pedulla et al. By the turn of the millennium, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was enacted to address the so-called gap in school achievement between children from communities with more advantages and resources and those from less-resourced communities.

#KINDERGARTEN 2 GAME CREATION FAILURE FREE#

The 1990s, for example, brought a dramatic change as free play and center time were replaced with rigid, skills-focused, highly teacher-scripted curricula, targeted to children in schools in underserved communities. Historical changes in educational philosophy tell a story of play that was excised from early childhood classrooms. Playful Learning: A Powerful Teaching Toolĭespite its efficacy in supporting learning, play in early childhood settings has often suffered a bad reputation. By maximizing children’s choice, promoting wonder and enthusiasm for learning, and leveraging joy, playful learning pedagogies support development across domains and content areas and increase learning relative to more didactic methods (Alfieri et al. Whether solitary, dramatic, parallel, social, cooperative, onlooker, object, fantasy, physical, constructive, or games with rules, play, in all of its forms, is a teaching practice that optimally facilitates young children’s development and learning. This excerpt also illustrates the ways in which play and learning mutually support one another and how teachers connect learning goals to children’s play. ( See below for a discussion of play on a spectrum.) 2018, an idea first introduced by Bergen 1988) helps to resolve old divisions and provides a powerful framework that puts playful learning-rich curriculum coupled with a playful pedagogy-front and center as a model for all early childhood educators. This piece, which is an excerpt from Chapter 5 in Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs Serving Children from Birth Through Age 8, Fourth Edition (NAEYC 2022), suggests that defining play on a spectrum (Zosh et al. Newer research, however, allows us to reframe the debate as learning via play-as playful learning. And, in part, it is motivated by older perceptions of play and learning. In part, the persistent belief that learning must be rigid and teacher directed-the opposite of play-is motivated by the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes playful learning (Zosh et al. Play versus learning represents a false dichotomy in education (e.g., Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 2008).

Kindergarten 2 game creation failure