The social and cognitive benefits of recess and free play are too important to be ignored. During recess children learn valuable social skills like learning to negotiate with peers in order to keep playing with them.
“I want to play on the monkey bars too. How about we take turns?”
“You got to choose 4-square yesterday, today let’s play tag, okay?”
“Come play with us! We need more people to play kickball! It will be fun!”
Recess also gives children opportunities to become comfortable with deciding how they want to spend their free time and who they want to spend their time with.
The argument that physical education is a good substitute for recess is not adequately supported. The instructional nature and highly structured time found in physical education classes does not allow children the same sort of free time to explore, be creative, or control how they spend their time with peers, on their terms. Physical education also does not give them the time to practice sophisticated ways to compromise and resolve conflicts.
Dr. Anthony Pelligrini has studied important questions like, does what children do on the playground predict school achievement? In fact, Dr. Pelligrini found that the behavioral measures he developed to observe children at recess actually predicted first grade achievement better than kindergarten test scores. Meaning, playground behaviors should be considered an important part of child development that could determine academic success of children early on in child education.
How do you feel about the amount of free-play time your children gets at school? Do you agree that play could potentially promote academic success?