The subject comes into focus from multiple discussions about how boys, especially from disadvantaged backgrounds but not only, are not achieving academically as well as girls are. It begins in kindergarten where girls hit the ground with greater social maturity and boys learn more by active physical methods. So yes the academic focus, with kindergarten standards now what were first grade expectations, particularly disadvantages boys, but my belief only relatively so: girls on average would do better over a longer term with a less aggressive academic demand in kindergarten too. Minimally there is no evidence that the current academic focused approach gets anyone better off by third to fourth grade; it only hurts some more than others. Note this is not a question of full vs half day kindergarten. It is a question of what sort of programming there is and what the skills expectations are.
YES!
I’ll go even further: elementary school needs to retain a strong play-based component through fifth grade.
Years ago I was tapped to be a part-time weekly specialist for “enrichment” for a year, and as part of that I had to design something enriching for fifth graders to do each week. I set up one session each month for “centers,” like what kindergarten has. In kindergarten the centers are usually something like art and blocks and kitchen and imaginative play (with costumes and such). I set up the fifth grade centers with some electronic kits and some building kits and some crafting materials and some thinky board games, and it was a huge hit.
Children need a chance to engage in explorative play that’s not on a screen. Not all kids have any access to that. Schools need to be a place where it happens a lot more than once a month.
That said, I hope it’s not too much of a hijack to throw out my personal speculation about why some boys aren’t doing as well: I think that a lot of boys respond really well to firm boundaries and clear consequences for misbehavior, and a lot of schools have done away with these. If a kid misbehaves and the consequences are immediate and unpleasant, it’s a lot easier for them to make a good choice next time. If a kid misbehaves and the consequences are that they get to go for a walk and get a snack, they learn an entirely different lesson about whether to stay focused.
More play, and more unpleasant results for misbehavior, would do wonders for education, IMO.
I’d say more of life-skill based than play
If it’s not yours, don’t touch it.
How to handle it when Jenny doesn’t want to play with you.
How to say I’m sorry. How to respond when someone apologizes to you.
Transitioning to the next station in less than 15 minutes.
&c.
It’s not clear to me that play based kindergarten would result in boys being more academically capable in higher grades.
Girls being more emotionally mature doesn’t go away before kids graduate high school. While I’m not prepared to say girls are “smarter”, they are more likely to succeed in an environment that values diligent attention and quiet study.
According to the article and study cited below, girls have been outperforming boys in school since we’ve been tracking grades. It’s not something new, it’s something old, and unrelated to our exact method of teaching. I’d say pushing the boys back a grade so that they’re as emotionally mature as the girls in their classes might be more effective.
With thanks to Robert Fulghum
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This may be true, it may be true at 22 too, but the being ahead or behind half a year at 15 or 16 is of less impact than the same difference at 5 to 6.
I think the best predictor for how good an educational system is the student to teacher ratio. The fewer students per teacher, the better the students do. Everything else has less impact.
A great point.
Absolutely yes! I run a one-day-a-week sports program for kindergartners, and these kids need play time to learn how to be social. Homework in kindergarten? WTF?? Their homework should be “go play with your friends”.
Parental prepping of kids age 0 - 5 is, in many cases abysmal. That is why public schools have Pre-K programs that accept kids at 3 years of age and give them 2 years of Pre-K. Early childhood education has become more academically focused because, quite frankly, it has to. Kids were coming to school woefully behind in development and remaining behind their entire elementary careers. The situation has been steadily improving because we have invested so much time, money, and effort into early childhood education.
We don’t need more “play based” school. We need parents to put more time and effort into helping their children develop and prepare for school.
I know nothing about your sports program, but what I perceive in terms of organized sports for 5-6 yr olds might reflect some of the same concerns as expressed in the OP. Maybe wait a few years before buying the full uniforms and compiling win/loss records, and instead, through sport teach the kids cooperation, sportsmanship, etc.
I’m sensitive to what you say. And I don’t think the P is suggesting just day-long recess. But instead, teaching body movement, mind and emotional discipline, vocal skills, cooperation and behavior through play-based curriculum, rather than academics.
My daughter is a youth librarian and teaches toddler music, and speaks pretty persuasively about the overall benefits young children derive from music and body movement.
Of course, I suspect one difficulty involves targeting different kids. The kids who come to kindergarten not knowing their colors or body parts likely need something more rigorous than “play.” Our district has pre-K which hopefully assists kids designated as “at risk.” And some groups of kids might benefit from getting them used to academics. But speaking broadly, for most kids I think just working on molding them into decent human beings is more important than academics.
Preschool yes. But STRONG disagree that preschool “has to be” or should be academically focused. Parents do not need to be worried and stressing over their preschooler hitting academic standards. Playing with their kids, reading to their kids, doing building activities together, art projects … preschool to get other play experiences and to learn that other kids are not just objects that are harder to control than the ball I just kicked … Rushing it does not help.
Sure some kids can be toilet trained at 18 months and some don’t until they’re three - the early ones don’t poop better at five and trying to push the others to do it sooner is dumb, just making everyone frustrated. Same thing.
Agreed. I don’t really teach much of my sport to these kids. Most of my time with them is play time that tries to get them moving and exercising, respecting one another as individuals, and giving them just a peek into the sport itself. They have the attention span of gnat, so I have to keep them moving and engaged with different activities throughout the class time, so I mix up play with pre-sport foundational activities. Frankly, it’s not what I had envisioned when I started it earlier this year, but the kids and parents seem to like it, and I hope they’ll eventually develop enough to transition to the core of my program for older kids and adults. I have heard from some of the parents that their kids enjoy their time with me enough that they’ve dropped from other programs (eg gymnastics/tumbling).
I agree, but the terminology being used is extremely misleading. We do not grade early childhood, and we do not have “academic standards”. We have developmental standards. Children should be developing at a certain rate based on their age. Two things can negatively affect this, and this parental involvement in the early childhood development of their own children, and physical/mental problems that can inhibit proper development.
In the case of the former, getting children into an organized environment at the age of 3 can counteract the developmental neglect they suffered at home. In the case of the latter, we have a strong staff of LBS1 experts, psychologists, etc, who can set up an IEP (Individual Educational Plan) for each child based on individual needs and what’s best at meeting them.
This seems to describe the need for well taught Physical Education.
As someone who left that field because it’s largely run by morons, good luck. With that said, there are people doing it well. Particularly at the elementary level, PE should pretty much never involve “organized” sports. Rather, it should be game based, skills development, exploration and body awareness. I very much enjoyed teaching PE at the Kindergarten level, and they definitely need it.
Many school districts foist this responsibility onto classroom teachers or support personnel, which is often a recipe for - if not disaster - a mediocre educational experience. But as I say, that’s often the case with qualified PE teachers too, unfortunately.
I coached my son in age 5-6 soccer. I knew little about soccer, but wanted the kids to have fun and get exercise. They had a great time in practices. At the end of the game several would ask me, “Did we win?” I got so say, “Did you have fun? Then you are a winner in my book!” 
There was a freaking DRAFT in this league, and I ended up with all the misfits, late applier, etc. Needless to say, combined with my stellar coaching, we did not dominate the league. At one point, a bunch of parents confronted me saying, “Coach, when are we going to win a game?” So at practice, I had the kids play a game against their parents. The kids’ were shooting at a goal was the width of the field, and the parents’ were shooting for a goal maybe 6’ wide. And I told the parents to LET the kids win. Can you guess the result? The kids STOMPED the parents - because the little numbnuts couldn’t remember which goal to shoot at! 
Nevertheless, at the last game, I overheard the parents of one particularly timid kid offering him $ if he scored a goal. I wanted to yell at them, “Maybe offer him a hug if he doesn’t run away from the ball should it happen to roll towards him!”
A lot of (not all) parents really suck.
You are not describing a typical preschool. To keep the discussion a bit focused - the quality and nature of the preschool matters. See this article for some grist on that -
https://www.npr.org/2022/02/10/1079406041/researcher-says-rethink-prek-preschool-prekindergarten
Really worth reading the whole article. And @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness it challenges your discipline hypothesis so I’d love your reaction.
Re the OP: Yes!! I’ll add that even academics should be more play-based in the early grades, and with fewer expectations. I used to do letter games with my kids where we would take turns sounding out ridiculous combinations of letters, and play with numbers with manipulatives. Not expecting them necessarily to read or be able to do math, just playing around in a quasi-educational fashion.
And high expectations! My older child, who behaves more “like a boy” than my actual boy child does, does really well with teachers with firm boundaries and clear consequences, and both my kids do really well with high expectations (obviously once they’ve gotten out of the earliest grades, lol). I always saw that my kids learned a LOT more and even liked the class quite a bit more when the teachers had high expectations of them, whereas they would… meet the low expectations of teachers who had low expectations of them.
Hmm…I read the whole article, and I really don’t think it challenges what I’m saying at all. The closest I can find is this:
In other words, regularly reprimanding kids for doing normal kid stuff at 4 years old, even suspending them, could backfire down the road as children experience school as a place of unreasonable expectations.
Is that what you’re looking at?
Because that’s not what I’m talking about at all. Of course expectations for behavior should reflect what children can actually do, and reprimanding four-year-olds for not sitting silently in rows for 30 minutes at a time is bananas.
What I’m talking about is a different phenomenon, such as the fourth grader who decides to ignore the principal when she asks him to take off his hood, or who keeps talking over his teacher during the core part of the lesson, or who doesn’t do work and then lies to his parents about why, or who throws a ball over the fence to piss off the other kids and then throws a shit fit when the teacher calls him over, or who does a myriad of other things that make life worse for those around them. These are teachable moments.
If we use those teachable moments to teach that acting like a jerk means your life gets worse, and also teach alternative behaviors that can make life better, kids learn an important lesson. But if the principal sighs and lets the fourth grader ignore her, or the teacher says “Shh” and then keeps teaching while the fourth grader keeps talking, or the parent just tells the kid how bad the teacher is and doesn’t hold the kid accountable for doing the work, or the teacher sends the ball-throwing kid to the office where they sit on a bean bag and play on an iPad for fifteen minutes until they’re calm and then return to class–in all those cases, it’s also a teachable moment, and we’ve taught the kid a completely different lesson.
Kids are gonna be kids. Kids are gonna fuck around. Part of our job is helping them find out. Not to be mean, not to be the Punisher, not to go all RESPECT MAH AUTHORITEH on them, but to help them process their choices and understand how those choices result in various outcomes, in a way that helps them develop good decisionmaking.
I think a lot of kids these days are fucking around and finding out that fucking around is actually a pretty successful approach. And that’s not great.