While most school districts across the
country are cutting back on recess time and ramping up the Ritalin, one Texas
school has kindergartners and first graders sitting still and “incredibly
attentive.”
What’s their secret? Their recess time
has tripled. Instead of 20 minutes of recess per day,
Eagle Mountain Elementary kindergartners and first graders now get an hour,
broken up into four 15-minute breaks, in addition to lunchtime.
Their teachers say it’s totally
transformed them.
The kids are less fidgety, less
distracted, more engaged in learning and make more eye contact.
Eagle Mountain is one of dozens of
schools in Texas, Oklahoma and California testing out extra recess time as part
of a three-year trial. The pilot program is modeled after the Finnish school
system, whose students get some of the best scores in
the world in
reading, math and science.
The designer of the program —
called LiiNK — is kinesiologist Debbie Rhea of
Texas Christian University. Rhea spent 6 weeks in Finland in 2012 to
discover the secret of their success.
The biggest difference Rhea noticed was
that students in
Finland get much more recess than American kids do — 15 minutes of “unstructured
outdoor play” after every 45 minutes of instruction.
They key is the “unstructured,” Rhea told TODAY, which means kids are allowed to
run, play and make up their own games.
While indoor breaks are better than
none, Rhea says they should ideally take place outdoors because fresh air,
natural light and vivid colors all have a big impact on brain function.
The LiiNK website says benefits of frequent recess
include:
§ Increased attentional
focus
§ Improved academics
§ Improved attendance
§ Decreased behavioral
diagnoses (anxiety, ADHD, anger)
§ Improved creativity and
social skill development
Some of the teachers at Eagle Mountain
say they were nervous about how they would keep the kids on track academically
with all the lost classroom time. But halfway through the first year of the
program first-grade teacher Cathy Wells told NPR her kids “were way ahead of schedule.” Wells
said she’s spending a lot less time sharpening pencils these days.
“You know why I was sharpening them?
Because they were grinding on them, they were breaking them, they were chewing
on them. They’re not doing that now. They’re actually using their pencils for
the way that they were designed — to write things!”
“If you want a child to be attentive and
stay on task — if you want them to encode the information you’re giving them in
their memory — you’ve got to give them regular breaks,” says Ohio State
University pediatrician Bob Murray.
Murry helped write the American
Pediatrics Association’s policy statement on recess. He says brain scans have shown kids
learn better after a break for physical activity and unstructured play.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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