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Today Sequoia and her friend Noah came out of school giddy from the last class period. “We didn’t have religion today,” Noah gushed. “We walked to the playground!”
At my child’s elementary school, where she has two recess periods in her 3 ½ – 4 ½ hour school day (that’s the normal schedule, folks), not to mention a two-period-long phys ed class on Mondays, the natural substitution for religion class in the absence of the teacher was to walk the kids to the playground. If you’re not in the “Kids don’t play enough” camp, you might be wondering, “When the hell are the kids learning?” As most people know, kids learn from play. Moreover, if you’ve seen Neil deGrasse Tyson’s video about how to get your kid into science, then you know that they learn when you leave them the hell alone (I’m paraphrasing). I could not help think of this video when listening to Sequoia excitedly talk about her playground experience today.
“Noah and I made machines that launched rocks at the other kids!”
OMG. Say nothing. Where is she going with this?
“At first we didn’t launch rocks. We were just ducking, but once we got used to the rocks that were coming at us from the boys, we started using rocks.”
If you’ve read my post about Sequoia’s Kindergarten experience last year, then you have no trouble picturing this Lord of the Flies scenario.
“We were also using snail shells. We turned things into nets so we could catch things they were launching at us.”
That’s pretty smart.
She went on and on, for the whole walk home, about these “machines” that she and Noah made and how they tried launching different things and had accidentally launched a live snail but Sequoia noted that it was unnecessary to use live snails since they’d counted “55” snail shells…
They were experimenting. They were engaged in: Science. And not because the substitute teacher had encouraged this. After all, it was not her idea to use stagnant brown and green pond water to slime up the “machine”. In fact, the teacher was sitting on a bench keeping an eye on everyone (presumably to ensure that they remained in Germany). Most of the girls were on the swings; Sequoia had joined the boys in their rock launching war because her friend Noah was playing.
Kids need to play. Kids need to launch rocks. They need to launch anything they can find in order to figure out the direction it goes, how far it travels, and how hard it hits someone in the eye. That, my friends, is science.
[…] Her schedule varied by day, starting at either 0755, 0840, or 0945, and ending between 1130 and 1300. School days lasted from 3 ½ to 4 hours and 15 minutes. Keep that in mind when you consider the children’s progress: half days, starting one year later than American schools. They also have several recesses, a Frühstuck (second breakfast) Pause, and on Mondays, two class periods of Sport (gym class). Clearly, taking breaks is not a bad thing. Not to mention, kids are learning as they play. […]