Schools Take Serious Look At Child’s Play

By herself, in the corner of Room 4 at Conte-West Hills Magnet School, a 4‑year-old was conducting an experiment, while the district’s top administrators watched her in an experiment of their own.

Fatima, a pre-kindergartener, was sitting before an array of classroom supplies and and an empty fish tank, filled a quarter of the way up with water. After marking down her guesses on a worksheet about what objects would float, she tossed in a Post-It, a binder clip, a keychain-sized globe, a plastic fork and a screw.

She’d predicted all of them right, up until a reporter asked her what would happen to a pen. Fatima thought it would sink, but it bobbed on top of the water.

Shyly, she theorized that it’s all about size, that bigger things float. Not quite the right way to think about density, but it was a close guess. And it was based on the scientific method, using experimental data to understand the world around her.

Observing how Fatima directed her own experiment and thought about those conclusions was itself part of a bigger experiment, as New Haven tries to understand how kids in the earliest grades learn most effectively.

Fatima is one of 150 students, from pre-kindergarten through third grade, enrolled in a six-week summer pilot program at Conte-West Hills, all based on ​“play.”

Experts in psychological development say that allowing kids to play is more appropriate for their age than drilling letters and numbers to prep for standardized tests.

The play might look unserious, but along the way, kids are still collaborating with their classmates, growing their curiosity and imagination and learning to problem solve, child development specialists say. It’s essentially a freer version of the student-directed ​“project-based learning” that’s caught on in the upper grades.

“We are not here to build small people who follow directions and be quiet. We are here to build thinkers and challengers and explorers. And that’s way more fun, right?” said Peg Oliveira, the executive director of the Gesell Institute of Child Development, who is advising the district on the summer pilot. ​“They feel empowered. They feel like they are actually teaching themselves, one another and even the teacher sometimes.”

After pressure from the NHPS Advocates, a watchdog group of parents and teachers, led to an aldermanic hearing about play in March, the district used $38,000 in Title I funding to hire the Gesell Institute. The institute conducted a four-day training for 55 staff members and is providing job-embedded coaching for the summer program.

A play-based curriculum isn’t daycare. It doesn’t mean setting a box of toys in the middle of the room and letting kids have at it for a few hours, Oliveira said. Often initiated by the teacher but directed by kids, the lessons are usually aligned to the Connecticut Early Learning Standards and Common Core State Standards.

“While there, the teacher should be very present, leading the learning to the next level,” Oliveira said. ​“It’s so much work to do what they’re doing, but a different kind of work that’s so much more rewarding.”

The classes look similar to what you might see during a typical day at Elm City Montessori School, New Haven’s one locally approved charter school. There, kids can pick from dozens of activities on the shelves. But the district-run pilot leads kids to a narrower set of ​“stations.”

Unless there’s a downpour, they also spend an hour outside in totally unstructured free play, whether that means racing boats across a pond, biking in circles, playing house, practicing whistling or looking at spiders in the grass.

When it’s done right, the children should feel ​“invested,” Oliveira said. They shouldn’t be saying they’re bored or that they don’t know what they’re doing; instead, as reporters saw when they toured on Wednesday, kids were gripped by the joys of discovering something new.

During the pilot, kids have been engaged, teachers feel connected, and disciplinary problems have been almost non-existent, aside from one referral, administrators reported.

Teachers said that’s because they’re not wasting time and energy trying to get kids to focus on the district-mandated task, instead putting their effort into learning what kids want to know. Doris Kierce, an early childhood paraprofessional at King-Robinson, said it has been ​“like a breath of fresh air.”

“It’s more child-centered,” she said. ​“It’s their ideas, and their imagination. We set up the structure, then really just see them grow, see how smart they are.”

So far, the experiment has been such a success that they say they’re planning to roll out a play-based curriculum for pre-kindergarten through first grade at five schools around the district, said Mary Derwin, an early learning administrator.

On Wednesday, at one table in Room 3, pre-kindergarteners screwed together halves of plastic eggs. A boy named Jeziel matched colors until he could count up a perfect dozen, then broke them apart and started again.

A girl named Elyana, meanwhile, made a nesting chamber of an egg within an egg. She placed a green ball of clay at the very center. ​“Smell it,” she told a reporter, holding it up. What scent was that? ​“Green,” she said, synesthetically.

Next door, in Room 5, a boy named Adair made a red crab with a pattern-block puzzle. As he picked through the pile, his teacher identified the blue pieces as trapezoids; the yellow, as hexagons; and the brown, as rhombuses.

When he was done, she asked him to spell ​“crab,” which he did reversing ​“b” as ​“d” at first. Then she asked him to try it in Spanish. ​“How do you say it,” she asked. “¿Cómo se dice?” By clapping, they compared how ​“cangrejo” has three syllables, while ​“crab” has one, which made Adair laugh with glee.

And in Room 11, students had spent all summer trying to answer the question, ​“What is home?” During the first week, they built their answer in the middle of the classroom, making a home out of stacked boxes, draped with paper streamers and adorned with yarn diamonds.

The ​“classroom symbol,” as they call it, was meant to stay up for only a few days, but the kids have begged their teacher, Jacqui Giorgio, normally a reading instructor, not to take it down. She acquiesced.

On Wednesday, she helped a student write a paragraph about home, while two other girls painted a cityscape and a boy built a model home from magnetic blocks. As she looked around the room, Giorgio said that her experience with the pilot program had been transformative.

During the regular school year, the classes felt ​“all scripted,” but here, ​“they own it, they believe in it,” Giorgio said. ​“I don’t want the summer to end. I want this to go through the school year, I truly do. I want to just keep going.”