At this school in Tokyo, five-year-olds cause traffic jams and windows are for Santa to climb into. Meet: the world's cutest kindergarten, designed by architect Takaharu Tezuka. In this charming talk, he walks us through a design process that really lets kids be kids.
Imagine being a meter tall and dashing around the donut-shaped roof of your school. Or picture studying math while taking in the rich smell of timber in one of a variety of wooden houses connected by a single three-story atrium, or attending a zero-carbon wooden school in the forest.
Far removed from the standardized post-World War II white concrete boxes that dot the country, these schools represent an innovative direction the Japanese educational system could take. Takaharu and Yui Tezuka, Kengo Kuma and Ben Nakamura, the acclaimed architects behind the designs, are committed to creating educational environments to cultivate and inspire the next generation.
Fuji Kindergarten
When first meeting Takaharu and Yui, the husband-and-wife team who created Fuji Kindergarten, I was immediately drawn to their playful spirit.
"Our architecture is about family - everything we learn, everything we do about architecture starts with our family," says Takaharu. The Tezukas have two young children.
The architects' motto is: "If you don't know happiness, how can you provide it to others?"
Located in Tachikawa, western Tokyo, the 750-student, three-year preschool built in 2007 is a one-story structure in the shape of a donut. The entire school feels like a playground, from the open-air central courtyard to the building's wide circular roof. Even the interior classroom areas follow an open-school plan where partitions separate sections and all furniture is moveable. Takaharu says the goal is for "these children to be stronger and more flexible."
For an adult, the traffic patterns on the ground floor, center courtyard and roof may look dizzying. However, studies have shown that children at Fuji invent and play six times the number of games that a typical kindergarten student plays; the average Fuji student runs about 5 km each day.
"And they aren't even being chased!" Takaharu jokes.
For the kids at Fuji, a noisy environment is thought to improve concentration.
"Noise is fundamental," Takaharu says. "These days the government is trying to set rules to create perfect acoustic conditions - in those buildings there is no noise and children get nervous. Autistic children start showing symptoms."
He explains how the body has a "noise-cancellation system" and that hearing noises from multiple sources, such as the class next door, can have a calming effect.
The debate about appropriate curriculum for young children generally centers on two options: free play and basic activities vs. straight academics (which is what many kindergartens across the country have adopted, often reducing or eliminating time for play). A new report, "Lively Minds: Distinctions between academic versus intellectual goals for young children," offers a new way to look at what is appropriate in early childhood education.
The report was written by Lilian G. Katz, professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is on the staff of the Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting. She is past president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the first president of the Illinois Association for the Education of Young Children. Katz is currently the editor of the online peer-reviewed trilingual early childhood journal Early Childhood Research & Practice, and she is the author of more than 100 publications about early childhood education, teacher education, child development and the parenting of young children.
In her report, published by the nonprofit group Defending the Early Years, Katz says that beyond free play and academics, "another major component of education - (indeed for all age groups) must be to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children's innate intellectual dispositions." As the title
of the paper indicates, Katz makes a distinction between academic goals for young children and intellectual goals. What's the difference? She writes:
ACADEMIC GOALS
Academic goals are those concerned with the mastery of small discrete elements of disembodied information,usually related to pre-literacy skills in the early years, and practiced in drills, worksheets, and other kinds of exercises designed to prepare children for the next levels of literacy and numeracy learning. The items learned and practiced have correct answers, rely heavily on memorization, the application of formulae versus understanding, and consist largely of giving the teacher the correct answers that the children know she awaits. Although one of the traditional meanings of the term academic is "of little practical value," these bits of information are essential components of reading, writing, and other academic competencies useful in modern developed economies, and certainly in the later school years. In other words, I suggest that the issue here is not whether academic skills matter; rather it is about both when they matter and what proportion of the curriculum they warrant, especially during the early years.
INTELLECTUAL GOALS
Intellectual goals and their related activities, on the other hand, are those that address the life of the mind in its fullest sense (e.g. reasoning, predicting, analyzing, questioning, etc.), including a range of aesthetic and moral sensibilities. The formal definition of the concept of intellectual emphasizes reasoning, hypothesizing, posing questions, predicting answers to the questions, predicting the findings produced by investigation, the development and analysis of ideas and the quest for understanding and so forth.
An appropriate curriculum for young children is one that includes the focus on supporting children's in-born intellectual dispositions, their natural inclinations. An appropriate curriculum in the early years then is one that includes the encouragement and motivation of the children to seek mastery of basic academic skills,e.g. beginning writing skills, in the service of their intellectual pursuits. Extensive experience of involving preschool and kindergarten children in in-depth investigation projects has clearly supported the assumption that the children come to appreciate the usefulness of a range of basic academic skills related to literacy and mathematics as they strive to share their findings from their investigations with classmates and others. It is useful to assume that all the basic intellectual skills and dispositions are in-born in all children, though, granted, stronger in some individuals than in others...like everything else.
Katz writes that longitudinal studies of the effects of different kinds of preschool curriculum models debunk the seemingly common-sense notion that "earlier is better" in terms of academic instruction. While "formal instruction produces good test results in the short term," she says, preschool curriculum and teaching methods that emphasize children's interactive roles and initiative may be "not so impressive in the short run" but "yield better school achievement in the long term."
130 teachers and academics call for schooling to be delayed by two years
Warning that current system is causing young children 'profound damage'
Call was dismissed as 'misguided' by a spokesman for Michael Gove
By Sara Smyth for the Daily Mail
Published: 19:51 EST, 11 September 2013
Children should not start primary school until they are six or seven-years-old, according to a coalition of education experts who warn of the damaging pressure to perform in class at a young age.
A letter written by 130 teachers, academics and authors said the UK should follow the Scandinavian model and put off formal lessons for two years.
Under the UK's current system, children start full-time schooling at the age of four or five.
Experts say this is causing 'profound damage' in a generation which is not encouraged to learn through play.
But the call was last night dismissed by as 'misguided' by a spokesman for the Education Secretary Michael Gove.
Children in the UK are obliged by law to be in school aged five, which the lobby group said is creating a 'too much, too soon' culture.
The warning singled out recent government proposals which mean five year olds could be formally tested from the beginning of their schooling.
Under the current system, children are first assessed at the age of seven. But under Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's proposals, a 'baseline' test could be introduced in the first year of primary school.
The group of experts warned that monitoring a pupil's progress from such a young age promotes stress and fear around learning.
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Does Common Core Ask Too Much of Kindergarten Readers? By Katrina Schwartz
Sandwiched between preschool and first grade, kindergarteners often start school at very different stages of development depending on their exposure to preschool, home environments and biology. For states adopting Common Core, the standards apply to kindergarten, laying out what students should be able to do by the end of the grade.* Kindergartners are expected to know basic phonics and word recognition as well as read beginner texts, skills some childhood development experts argue are developmentally inappropriate.
"Most five-year-old children are not really ready to learn to read," Carlsson-Paige said. "There are many experiences in the classroom that are beneficial for building the foundation for learning to read that will come later." She favors a play-based classroom that gives students hands-on experiences, helping them to develop the symbolic thinking necessary to later recognize letters and numbers.
"Research shows on a national scale there's less play and experiential based curriculum happening over all, and much more didactic instruction, even though we have research that shows long term there are greater gains from play-based programs than academically focused ones," Carlsson-Paige said.
While Common Core aligned assessments don't kick in until third grade, many teachers feel pressure to make sure kids are meeting the specified standards before they move on to first grade. That pressure can mean more focus on academics, at the sacrifice of play time.
Kindergarten teachers try to interpret the standards and translate them into developmentally appropriate activities. But they struggle when kids still don't meet Developmental Reading Assessment benchmarks. "Teachers start to question themselves and waver even though they believe in doing what's developmentally appropriate," said Colleen Rau, a reading intervention specialist at Aspire Berkley Maynard Academy. "So I think we really need to think about taking the pressure away and looking at student growth."
Techie Babies Era, Rising? 1 in 3 Babies Learn to Use A Smartphone Before They Could Walk or Talk!
Do you remember the very first activity that you were fond of doing as an infant? I don't and I can't. But whatever it was, I'm sure it has nothing to do with gadgets. You see, my fascination with electronic stuff started a bit later, when I was already in elementary school and it was when my dad gave me and my younger brother our first gaming console.
Then again, I'm from another generation; One that first had 'internet at home' when they were in high school and first experienced an iPhone when they were already in their first job after college.
Today, babies are born in a different world - at least, in terms of technology. As soon as they open their eyes, they are bombarded with gadgets and electronics. They see their parents use smartphones and tablets to take photos and then upload the images on social networking even before they are able process what's happening around them. Heck, there are even mobile applications now that made specifically for babies, to keep them preoccupied. Suffice it to say, 'use of technology' has become one of the first lessons a human being gets as soon as he or she is born into this planet.
Last week, at the annual meeting of the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) held in San Diego, USA, researchers disclosed findings that one in seven toddlers under the age of one in the United States have learned to use a gadget for at least one hour per day. Their research also showed that more than half of those children who are less than one year old had watched a TV show, 36% had already touched or scrolled a mobile device's screen and almost one quarter had made a phone call!
"We didn't expect children were using the devices from the age of 6 months. Some children were on the screen for as long as 30 minutes," shared the study's lead author Dr. Hilda Kabali.
