I began my teaching career in another state, teaching preschool. I worked at a brand new early childhood facility with nearly twenty classes of children, pre-k through kindergarten. I was assigned to a huge room, given a generous budget, and told to make a list of whatever furniture I needed. Then I was given a number to take to a local store where I purchased three baskets full of supplies. Our building had an on-campus art supply room and a full library. The tech staff set up a computer in my room. So I began my teaching career in a classroom that was furnished and supplied to meet the requirements of “learning through play” and “whole language”. I had a play kitchen, a sand/water table, a block center, a large lego table, a 4x8 race car mat, a science area with a butterfly house, and a reading corner.
The children in my first classroom played in centers, but they also completed a series of 10 to 12 work assignments each week. An example of one that might be found in the science center was a set of large laminated paper frogs with dots (1-10) on them. The students would retrieve a set of numbers from a basket and place them on the matching frogs. I had to record that the child had done the task and whether they did it successfully or not. The work assignments or “stations” were required by the curriculum and discussed at grade-level staff meetings. We had to have a minimum of ten listed in our lesson plans, related to the monthly theme, and each child had to complete them. I was given a lot of assistance by the other teachers, but even so…I was awake until nearly midnight every single night and spent countless hours preparing work stations. I also had to keep a meticulous log of results for each child and there was some testing at the end of each nine weeks.
My first students seemed to embrace the teaching concepts I had learned in college and were eager to explore the world through play. We discussed shapes and sizes in the block center. We talked about measuring and cooking in the kitchen center. They made towers and castles on the lego table. When we read the “Hungry Caterpillar” they were eager to talk about our own butterflies. I had the usual mix of high and low students and a few behavior problems, but I was very happy to see that most of what I had been taught in theory actually worked in practice.
Over the next few years I continued to use the same teaching methods, even after I transitioned into kindergarten. But as I was assigned to smaller rooms and given much smaller budgets some of the centers disappeared. About mid-way through my career my room had a kitchen center, lego table, science center, and reading corner. Gone were the big blocks and race car mat. Some of the work stations had been replaced by worksheets, and there was a whole lot more testing each semester. Most of this evolution was mandated by changes in the state requirements and expectations. But in the last few years I’ve made some changes in my classroom environment that have been prompted by changes in my students and the way they play.
I took the kitchen center out of my room because I could no longer monitor all of the discussions taking place about giving birth to babies, spending the weekend with boyfriends, arguments between parents, and smoking/drinking/partying. My first indication of change was the day I walked by the center and a boy said, “I told you to bring me a beer, and I meant now!”
Then boys started playing “Call of Duty” in the block center. Some of my current students want to talk about “Walking Dead” and zombies.
Little girls no longer play generic games; they act out the latest Disney movie, in great detail, and often with exact recall of dialogue. Or they play elaborate “pretend” games that begin with “you be the real mom and I’ll be the step-mom and you can be the real dad and he can be the step-dad”. I actually heard that last week during playdough time. While that is certainly a reality, in my own family and others, the discussions that follow can quickly escalate to something that none of them need to be talking about in public.
I have to carefully monitor discussions of Xbox games, videos, and movies. Last week one child wanted to tell everyone about “Chucky”.
I recently assigned one student to a counting game with insects and he promptly began “killing” them just as he obviously does on one of his video games at home.
Students in my classroom these days describe their toys and playtime using numbers, brands, models, styles, titles, and characters. They can tell me the powers of super heroes and the model of the next game they want to purchase. One student told me the opening date of a movie…still two weeks away. They can move their little thumbs with great control and proficiency. Yet many of these same children can NOT tell me their own birthday. They can’t write their own name. I asked one if he had any books at home. He said, “Yeah, but I don’t know where they are. Maybe under my bed.”
You can still Google hundreds of articles about the need for children to “learn through play”, but I’m curious about what some of them are learning and how the teacher is managing to be all over the room to monitor that play. My own teaching has evolved into a combination of reading, discussion, group tasks, worksheets, projects, and crafts. We also play a little. “Table centers” include matching cards, puzzles, simple games, playdough, journals, books, etc. On Fridays we expand to art center and a few blocks and floor puzzles. But gone are the days of simply “learning through play”. Higher state requirements for reading, more testing, tighter budgets, larger groups of children, more diverse learning problems, more serious behavior problems, and changes in the way children play have altered education forever.