Kirksville Child Development Center

Sadly...far too many early childhood programs have eliminated TRUE PLAY from their schedule and replaced it with more teacher directed time.

WHY?

Kindergarten Readiness

The absolutely non-developmentally appropriate push(SHOVE) down of meaningless academics onto children younger and younger has to stop!!!

ABC's and 123's (which, arguably a young child has NO USE OR NEED FOR) are replacing VITAL life skills like:

•Independent thinking
Independent thinkers are viewed as "a behavior problem". They are often viewed as children who don't listen.

•Perseverance
Due to rigid schedules(full of organized Kindergarten readiness activities), children are not given the time or the opportunity to persevere. Perseverance requires the opportunity to struggle. All too often:
1. Adults overly control children, eliminating any opportunity for a child to fail or struggle
2. When a child does struggle, adults fear that the struggle will lead to challenging behaviors so they rush in and solve the struggle
3. Children are not given the freedom nor time to have their own ideas. There are so many opportunities to persevere when you get to test your own ideas. Ideas take time. Fixing an idea that failed takes time AND perseverance. Accepting that an idea is won't work fosters another life skill: resilience.

•Critical Thinking:
Critical thinking requires curiosity, the need to know, the need to apply knowledge and see what happens, the need to form a thought or make a decision. This skill is developed through all the organic trials and errors of play. It is developed through the right to explore your own interests and ideas. It is formed through the freedom of applying one's own ideas to open-ended materials.
It is not formed when we are told what to do and how to do it.
It is fostered when children have ample time to attach their ideas to a room full of open-ended opportunities (not just one basket of loose parts, but an entire environment that is all considered "loose parts")

What is the very best way for children to develop not only this very small list of life skills, but SOOO many more?

By gifting them with AMPLE time to LEAD THEIR OWN PLAY.

What does "AMPLE TIME" mean? At LEAST five hours of a child's day SHOULD be led by THEIR PLAY.

NOTE: This is a very small list of the VITALLY important life skills that children are NOT developing when our goals are too focused on Kindergarten Readiness.

Please do not let Kindergarten Readiness block the bigger, much more important goal of preparing children for LIFE

Some kids are interested in "writing" when they're 2. They love letters and learn all the letter names and the letter song. If left to their own learning -- i.e., if not forced to trace letters or learn to spell their name -- they might draw scribbles all over paper and Magnadoodles and with chalk on the ground outside and tell you all about what they've "written". A few of them might even manage to form a few letters, which might be upside-down or backward or a little wonky in other ways, like Es with 57 lines on them instead of 3. 😍 And this is exactly what they should be doing. Playing to learn.

Some kids are not interested in "writing" when they're 2. 2 year olds are notorious for memorizing all of something that they love. Maybe another 2yo loves dinosaurs or types of trains or the names of the planets, and that's what they become intense about instead of letters.

Some kids aren't interested in writing until they're 5 or 6 or 7. Yes -- seven years old and not writing yet! It's the rare 7yo non-writer, in Western society, who manages to get to this age and not be beaten about by the educational system by this age. Most of them will already carry a few beliefs: "Writing is so hard." "Writing is not fun at all." "I am bad at writing."

But every once in awhile, one of them manages to slip through (often because they went to a rare play-based or otherwise non-traditional school). And at 5 or 6 or 7 they become interested in "writing" for the first time. And they might draw comic books or Christmas lists or endless copies of their favorite character from their piece of media and start labeling them, start writing a few letters and a few words, letters too-big and jumbled up and with young-child phonics as they learn literacy separate from learning writing (because those are different skills).

And that is exactly what THEY should be doing. PLAYING TO LEARN.

Because children LEARN THROUGH PLAY.

But most children are being forced to sit down and trace worksheets. They're not shown how to form letters "correctly" -- in the way that'll make for the easiest time writing fluidly later on -- because there are 30 of them in a class, they're all supposed to get through the letter A this week and B next week, and the teacher may or may not even write As "correctly" herself or know why it matters to teach it.

And, of course, no one cares whether the child is interested in learning about A and then B. (Or the fact that it would be easier for motor planning -- learning the movements of writing -- to learn to write the letters out of order, like learning the group of lowercase letters that all start with writing a "c" first...) It's just what they have to do to meet the educational standards, so they get put on the conveyor belt and churned through so they don't fall behind, so the school doesn't fall behind, so the school doesn't lose funding, so...

And then if they *do* fall behind, they get sent to me, and I have to untangle a layer of mess that would never have existed if they could've waited until they were interested.

(P.S. The words in this image are true no matter what you fill in the blanks with: "If you wait until a child is interested in ___ before you 'make' them ___, you won't have to 'make' them at all.")

[Image description: A half-transparent picture of a young child scribbling with oil pastels on a big piece of paper. Written over the top of it is a quote, by me, which reads: "If you wait until a child is interested in writing before you 'make' them write, you won't have to "MAKE" them at all." End description.]

I recently had yet another instance of the KCDC being called the Hippy Dippy preschool in town where all the kids run around feral, doing 'whatever they want.' While we do encourage free play and decision making and allow messes (life is messy!), this post from the Occuplaytional Therapist is at the heart of why we do what we do. We treat kids with dignity and respect because they are human.

Edu❤️

It’s really hard for adults to remember how young children are sometimes. How they’ve literally only existed in the world for a few months or days (comparatively)—that that small amount of time is all they’ve had to develop knowledge of literally everything in the world.

Especially when kids are very verbal, it’s easy to mistake their ability to talk intelligently about lots of things for emotional maturity or for them really “understanding” or knowing what they’re doing.

Which makes the experimental, egocentric (self-centered), “unempathetic” behavior of 2, 3, and 4 year olds seem even more heinous and shocking. Like, “They know exactly what they’re doing! They’re just doing it to make me mad!” Instead of realizing that it’s developmentally very normal for that age. They have only a few “tools” in their “tool box” to get their needs met, and they can only predict cause-and-effect immaturely and not very well. This leads to behavior that seems…less than ideal.

It’s normal. It’s normal. It’s normal.

You can help them by helping them acquire more “tools” for their “tool box” much more than by yelling, shaming, or hurting them. Perhaps the absolute most important thing you can do is to learn to keep yourself calm when they are not calm, and learn to sit with them through their storms. Their body physiologically learns how to calm itself from mirroring yours, and they learn coping tools through watching the ones you model for them.

[Image description: A square image with a pink background. It was made by Our Mama Village. It reads,
Toddlers are not bad. They are learning.
Toddlers are also not: Manipulating, hateful, out to get you, mean, bratty.
Toddlers are: Learning limits and boundaries. Trying to understand how the world works. Seeking connection. Unable to regulate their own emotions.
End description.]

Heavy work and proprioception are terms that are often interchanged, but there are differences between these terms. They are closely related!
Here is a full article on the specifics, and there is a free printable packet at the bottom of this blog: https://www.theottoolbox.com/heavy-work-activities/

Music and the brain- development, skill-building, and learning! https://www.theottoolbox.com/core-strengthening-with-music-movement/

The OT Toolbox 💕

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