There is no unanimous, internationally recognized definition of play, but the British organization Play England calls it a “process that is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated,” noting that “all children and young people need to play. The impulse to play is innate. Play is a biological, psychological and social necessity, and is fundamental to the healthy development and well-being of individuals and communities.”
The curriculum for the Swedish preschool doesn’t just promote play in all its activities—it also establishes children’s legal right to play and learn outside, both in planned environments, like the school yard, and natural environments, like the forest. This applies to preschools in the country as well as in the city. Urban preschools that lack natural environments in the school yard meet this requirement by simply taking the children to a public green space, like a park or nearby woods, on foot or via public transportation. “All of our children live in town, so they’re used to traffic. Even the one- and two-year-olds learn quickly to hold on to a buddy and walk,” says Cecilia Ramning, who runs the preschool Fyra Elementen in Stockholm. Although some of the parks are within a five-minute walk of the preschool, occasionally the children walk up to forty-five minutes to get to their destination, with the youngest ones taking turns using the preschool’s two double strollers. “Some people think that spending time at the park is the most important thing, but a lot of things can happen on the way. Sometimes we find acorns, chestnuts, or a really interesting beetle. The way to the park is an important part of the experience,” Ramning says.
A survey of a hundred preschools in Stockholm showed that the average time spent outside was one and a half hours per day—on a bad-weather day in the winter. On a nice day in the summer, the average was nearly six hours. I was particularly excited about this outdoor play guarantee. Nora’s new preschool was an ordinary municipal preschool, much like the one I myself had gone to many years ago. It didn’t cast itself as a nature preschool and was not a forest school by any means, but at least I knew that at a very minimum nature would be part of the curriculum and she would be able to play outside every day.
When we show up for Nora’s first day, the fenced yard outside the preschool is covered in well-trodden snow. Her spirit is still high from seeing three moose lazily cross the road so close to our car that I literally could have reached out of the window and poked them with one of the cross-country skis that I had sitting in the back.
A low hill on our right bears evidence of heavy sledding, and straight ahead we see a little snowman whose mouth is made of small clumps of mud. He is leaning ominously but still standing. There is a big plastic culvert in the snow-covered grass, some bushes with bright red branches, a small hillside slide, and a large sand play area with some benches, a mud kitchen, and a table. A woodshop and a playhouse are locked up for the winter, but a third building is unlocked and chock-full of outdoor toys that are used all year.
I’m carrying a plastic bag with supplies, and they look nothing like the things I used to bring to preschool every fall back in the States (one box of Kleenex, one box of jumbo-size crayons, one roll of paper towels, a bottle of hand sanitizer, one box of markers, and about twelve hundred glue sticks). In Sweden all the supplies needed for activities and daily operations are provided by the school. They don’t need more markers—what they want is children who can play outside in all types of weather. Which prompts this list of recommended supplies for winter:
• Thick mittens (two pairs)
• Woolen socks
• Winter coveralls
• Thick sweater/fleece
• Warm hat
• Rain gear
• Rain boots
• Complete change of clothes for indoor use
And, at the end, a cheery reminder: “We go outside rain or shine!”
Just like at Maya’s school, two industrial-size drying cabinets in the mudroom are humming quietly across from a whole wall full of colorful polyester rain clothes (galonisar) as we enter the building. We take our shoes off and go into the main hallway, where winter gear is stacked high in each child’s cubby space.
“Welcome!” says one of the lead teachers whom I have previously talked to over the phone. Like most Swedish preschool teachers I’ve met, she takes great care to get down to eye level with Nora and speaks directly to her. “My name is Ellen.”
Ellen gives us the rundown of this section of the preschool. There are twenty-three children (most of whom are between the ages of four and five, plus a couple of three-year-olds) and five staff, but not everybody is there at the same time. The first children show up at six thirty in the morning. Breakfast is served around eight, then the kids play until ten, when everybody gathers for circle time and a morning snack (universally referred to as “fruit time,” since fresh fruit is the go-to snack for Swedish preschools). After that, it’s time for outdoor play until lunch. This is followed by rest or naps for the youngest children, and story time for the older ones. The afternoon is mostly devoted to unstructured play—during the warmer months, usually outside again—or projects in smaller groups, broken up by a snack at two thirty. The last child leaves the facility at five in the evening.
Nora is taking it all in, curiously watching the kids around her. Some are busy playing a board game with a teacher; others are building a fort out of cushions in the reading room. There is an art room and a corner for pretend play, with dolls and a miniature kitchen. The walls are decorated with pictures and posters documenting projects that highlight different areas in the national curriculum: nature and technology, math, language development, creativity, and social skills. “Diversity—We are similar but still different,” one poster says, underneath a row of flags from different countries that the children have colored. A photo of four children wearing orange high-visibility vests in the forest is captioned, “We look for treasures in nature and check what is hiding underneath the leaves.” Another picture shows three boys building a house out of a cardboard box. “Collaboration,” the caption reads. “Helpfulness,” says another caption, next to a photo of a boy helping a girl slice a sausage. As we sit down on the floor for fruit time, I make another observation: None of the children in the room are overweight.
“We want our children to learn in a fun way,” Ellen explains later. “We don’t sit and teach the children to count to ten, but we use math constantly. For example, when we have circle time, they take turns counting how many children are here. We also incorporate science through simple experiments. Sometimes we bring in natural objects like rocks and sticks and test which ones float in a bucket of water. If we have snow, we might bring some inside and see what happens when it melts and we pour the water through a coffee filter. And of course they use physics every time they build something.”
“So how do you work with literacy skills?” I ask Ellen while Nora decides to join a group of older kids listening to a teacher reading a book.
“We don’t schedule time for the children to work on writing, if that’s what you mean,” she says, “and we don’t have specific lessons when we teach them the alphabet. But we work a lot on reading comprehension during story time, and the children further their language development immensely through creative and imaginative play.”
“Nora already knows how to write her name. She even uses the correct capitalization,” I volunteer a little too enthusiastically. Since I myself didn’t stop writing my name in all caps until I was about seven years old and Nora mastered this feat at her American preschool at age three, I of course think that she borders on genius.
Ellen raises her eyebrows behind her dark-rimmed glasses. “Wow,” she says, looking more surprised than impressed. “Well, we usually notice when the children become interested in writing and then we give them little notebooks that they can use. The idea is that it will come naturally when they’re ready for it. It’s a lot easier for them to learn when they have that intrinsic motivation.”
The idea that children learn t
hrough play is far from new. Plato said that “the most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things.” Much later, in the 1700s, Swiss-born Renaissance philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau championed the idea that all education of children should be based on play in his groundbreaking treatise Émile, or On Education. “Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it,” he famously wrote, in support of children’s innate ability to learn through their own experiences. Then, in the 1830s, a German teacher and staunch nature lover named Friedrich Froebel picked up on the idea that play is key to children’s physical, moral, and spiritual development. He was so convinced of this idea that he decided to create an early childhood education program that revolved around singing, dancing, gardening, self-directed play, and experiencing nature with all senses. Froebel viewed children as plants who would flower if they were allowed to learn at their own pace, nourished and guided by a teacher. He called his concept “kindergarten”—literally, a child’s garden.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Froebel’s play-based, child-centered philosophy caught on in Sweden, and until the 1950s preschools here were called barnträdgårdar, or “children’s gardens.” Froebel remains one of the most influential figures in early childhood education in Sweden, along with the Russian developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky and Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, both of whom advocated for a child-centered approach to learning. In a classroom setting, Piaget believed the learning process was more important than the end product, and that children can learn problem-solving skills only through active discovery. Vygotsky held that children’s cognitive development is heavily influenced by their culture and that they learn primarily by playing and interacting with older and more skilled children and adults. He is mostly known for his theory about the zone of proximal development, according to which one should respect each child’s individual space and readiness to learn a new concept. Parents and preschool teachers can do this by providing the “scaffolding” for development and giving the child just enough help to build his or her confidence to climb to the next level, without pushing or carrying. By giving children this space, adults allow them to develop self-esteem and learn to solve their own problems.
Anette Eskilsson, a Swedish early childhood educator who often speaks about stimulating children’s desire to learn, explains the Scandinavian attitude toward play and learning this way: “It’s two completely different ways of looking at it. You either view children as empty containers, waiting to be filled by adults through teaching, or you believe that they have the innate capability to learn together with others. In Sweden we have faith in the child’s own curiosity and desire to learn. We call this concept ‘the competent child.’”
Later, as I’m standing outside in the snow with another of Nora’s preschool teachers, Barbro, watching a dozen kids negotiate their way up and down the tiny sledding hill, she talks along similar lines. She strongly believes children learn more from direct experiences and play than when they are just asked to memorize information that is passed down to them by a teacher.
“Some children become interested in writing early, and when that’s the case we encourage them. It may be that they’re involved with pretend play and want to make tickets for something. In that case, the writing has a purpose. Otherwise they may just end up drawing lines that have no meaning to them,” she says.
“I know there are different philosophies out there. Some people think that you should focus on literacy, but I don’t like it when everything we do is just a straight line pointing toward school. This is preschool. Why can’t we let the children be in the here and now?”
Go Outside and Play
* * *
Parents and early childhood educators in Scandinavia seem to agree that if you want to raise healthy, capable learners, letting them play as much as possible is key. So why, if active play and learning are inseparable, are they so often pitted against each other on the other side of the Atlantic? How did it get to a point where an American preschool teacher feels guilty about letting a group of three-year-olds play, when this is exactly what three-year-olds are supposed to be doing?
Part of the explanation can likely be found in education reforms that have increased the academic requirements for kindergarten beginning in the 1980s and further exacerbated by No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and, most recently, the Common Core State Standards, according to the advocacy group Alliance for Childhood. Although child-centered early education models can be found in the US through the Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia approaches, “teacher-led instruction in kindergartens has almost entirely replaced the active, play-based, experiential learning that we know children need from decades of research in cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience,” the group notes. And now pre-K is suffering from the ripple effects.
Maureen Vandermaas-Peeler, a petite, fast-speaking professor of psychology at Elon University in North Carolina, doesn’t believe this change has been for the better. After spending a great deal of time researching early childhood learning, and teaching as a visiting scholar in Copenhagen, Denmark, she feels like the US could take some pointers from Scandinavia when it comes to attitudes about play-based learning. “Most people are unaware of the need in early childhood for play,” she says. “I think the teachers themselves want the children to learn through play, so they have to explain to the parents how important it is. When people are clamoring for more academics, I don’t think most of them want their kids to sit down all day. Unfortunately, by kindergarten they are expected to do that.”
Playing comes naturally to a child, regardless of what materials he or she may have on hand. A stick can become a doll, a sword, a horse, or a magic wand. A cardboard box can become a rocket ship, a cave, or a car. Kids can play for hours with extremely simple means. In fact, researchers have found that children play even more creatively when they don’t have ready-made toys at hand. Play is about as universal as it comes—it crosses all cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. What differs, Vandermaas-Peeler has found, is the value that various cultures place on play. American parents value play highly and often play with their young children. They are also extremely concerned about academics. Just do a quick Google search for “educational activities for two-year-olds” and find yourself sifting through nearly half a billion results. Likewise, Pinterest is ablaze with preschool printables and color-sorting activities and 101 ways to make geometric shapes out of a toilet-paper tube. Marketers naturally feed on parents’ anxiety about their children’s education too. “While your baby is beginning to explore, it’s never too soon to spark a love for subjects like art, music and language,” says the company behind the supposedly educational Baby Einstein videos that researchers actually found had no value to and may even hamper language development. “Take advantage of it by trying some expert-approved activities and products for a ‘cultured’ baby,” the company goes on, reinforcing parents’ fears that their children will be left behind sorting shapes while their peers are busy writing symphonies by the end of preschool.
While it is possible to integrate learning activities in the early years rather subtly and successfully, Vandermaas-Peeler points out that some people tend to get overzealous and unintentionally interrupt children’s play in their attempts to make it more “educational.” “I think parents become very nervous very early that their children will not become as successful as the next person if they can’t read or do addition and subtraction when they come to kindergarten,” she says. “In Denmark, play is valued for its own sake, whereas for many American parents it’s more about building skills and how it will help us later. That’s just how we’re culturally oriented, unfortunately. There are probably some good things and bad things about all of this, but there are so many opportunities for children in Denmark that are different. More freedom to choose, less structure. You choose and we help you figure it out.”
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Whereas many American parents see no choice but to jump on the early-academics bandwagon, Scandinavian parents seem remarkably unconcerned about formal instruction for preschoolers. They are confident that their children will learn what they need to learn when they are ready to learn it, and are happy to “just” let their preschoolers play. Preferably outside. Daniel, a Danish father of a kindergartner, explains it this way: “We see childhood as an important part of a human’s life and not as a race to adulthood. We believe and respect the fact that children have the right to a happy childhood.”
When I ask Kristoffer, a Swedish father of two young children, what he expects his children to learn between now and when they start formal schooling at age six, his answer is swift and affirmative. “I expect them to be children,” he says. “Soon enough they’ll be in school and they’ll get the rest there. All children are so different too. Some are interested in doing math and reading and writing early; others are not.”
Sure, children can be trained to learn how to read and write earlier through drilling and direct instruction. But why the rush? Alliance for Childhood notes that many children are not ready to read in kindergarten and that pushing them to live up to unrealistic academic goals can lead to inappropriate classroom practices. Plus, there is no scientific evidence that teaching children to read early will help them be better readers in the long run. A study that compared two groups of children in New Zealand who started their formal literacy lessons at ages five and seven, respectively, showed no significant difference in reading ability by the time they were eleven years old. But the children who had started at five had developed a less positive attitude to reading and had worse text comprehension than the children who had started when they were seven. Other studies have shown no significant association between the age a child starts school and his or her reading ability.
There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather Page 9