It’s Wednesday morning and the children are out for a period of free play.
They choose from four activities: Some run around hoops and balance a bean bag on their head to hone motor skills. Others wait their turn to ride a tricycle – and learn self-regulation.
Meanwhile, a group of boys are chalking the ground and another group, mainly girls, paint the road with water.
Their principal, Dr Dora Chen, 54, is holding a camera. She and her teachers snap pictures and take videos to keep tabs of each child’s progress at this experimental playschool at Temasek Polytechnic. Play, even free play, should have a purpose, she says.
“Play has been given a bad name because of our own fault,” says Dr Chen. Born in Taiwan, the former university don spent more than 20 years with experimental kindergartens in the United States. Her take is that early childhood educators haven’t been able to show that play is useful and that learning can still take place. This creates misconceptions that pre-schoolers who play are simply being rowdy.
On the other hand, she notes that all play and no work is no good either. Work, she says, is not a bad thing if the child is motivated.
Kids in Control
Apart from all the free play, there is another thing that would strike any visitor to the pre-school as strange: just how much say the kids have on what goes on.
When the school was considering between 17 different options to replace a cooking corner they had, they opened the choice up to the children by holding a “Voting Day”.
The children ended up voting for a mock Barbie castle made of cardboard boxes. Giving the children control teaches the children decision-making, gives them confidence and also makes them more interested in the lessons.
It also can create spin-off lessons like learning about castles around the world and figuring out how structures stand.
There is more. When the five-year-olds voted for the play corner, one child asked if the six-year-olds who share the area could vote too. They even discussed whether to write the older group a message or walk over to talk to them.
They invited them to vote together and prepared mini-presentations of the different options in case there were queries.
On Voting Day, they explained the voting process to the older group, instructed them on teh ground rules (“no changing of mind after voting”) and watched to see if the rules were followed.
On another occasion, a child’s suggestion to visit a real castle led to a virtual tour of Warwick Castle with 360-degree views of its hall and bedrooms.
There is almost nothing that cannot be turned into a lesson here. Dr Chen said that a lot of events and daily routines become learning opportunities in this school.
And this makes sense to me. It places learning in a real-life context for the children and keeps them motivated to learn. And when their eyes light up, teachers are inspired to do more.
Something right seems to be happening here: A teacher there who had taught for about four years at a kindergarten run by PAP Community Foundation told Dr Chen she was surprised by how much the children could do.
My colleague, whose daughter is three, was impressed by the children’s confidence when he toured the pre-school with us.
A model kindergarten?
But can this experiment be replicated elsewhere?
Dr Chen says when she visited a PAP Community Foundation kindergarten, she found that they had ordered materials from the same local publishers.
How one teaches may be just as important, if not more, than what material one has.
Teachers’ attitudes also matter. One teacher there who used to head a department at a private kindergarten for 13 years told Dr Chen that she used to map out her whole year’s lessons, and have the materials all cut and laminated.
But now, she keeps re-writing her lesson plan as new ideas come to her on the way home, in bed and waking up the next morning.
“You have to have a plan, but have the confidence to go in, read the situation and change course,” says Dr Chen.
She says the next step is to collaborate with another kindergarten to see if children in another setting will respond with the same enthusiasm.
From what I saw there in one day, this experiment appears to be a promising one indeed.
You can read ST’s interview with Dr Chen in The Straits Times today.
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