Article by Tom Price
While students lift weights at Providence Day School, Bluetooth-enabled monitors measure heart rates and transmit the information to a laptop computer. The computer saves the data for future analysis and zaps it to a screen that the students can watch as they work out.
The technology tells the students whether they should intensify efforts to meet their training goals or whether they’re pushing too hard and should back off a bit, says Kristie Oglesby, chair of the physical education department at the preK–12 day school in Charlotte, North Carolina. Later, students can go online to review the effects of the workout, such as how many calories they burned. Teachers refer to the data during student conferences and use the information for objective grading.
“It’s no longer a guessing game,” Oglesby says. “You’re either in your target zone or you’re not.”
Four hundred miles to the north—and at the opposite end of the technology spectrum—children at the National Child Research Center (NCRC) scamper about a playground in a manner their distant ancestors would recognize. They dig in dirt, jump over logs, climb on boulders and engage in other distinctly low-tech exercise.
Their play “stimulates all the senses,” says Cathy Parker, the Washington, D.C., pre-school’s motor (physical education) teacher. In addition to strengthening the children’s bodies, it “encourages creativity and imagination,” adds occupational therapist Marian Brice.
As schools come to grips with students who get less unstructured playtime than their predecessors did, school leaders are being asked to make high- and low-tech investments in their exercise facilities, equipment and philosophies. Technological advances are providing teachers with new tools. At the same time, research is demonstrating the value of old-fashioned outdoor play.
Besides acquiring the Bluetooth heart monitors, Providence Day in recent years has added a climbing wall and climbing ropes for the lower school, created two new facilities for the transitional kindergarten (TK) and contracted with an occupational therapist, according to Paul Ibsen, assistant head of school for finance and management.
The TK facilities—one inside and one outside—encourage creativity through play, says TK teacher Kelly Smith. Both are stocked with items that require the children to use their imagination.
In the outdoor space, for instance, children built a teepee from bamboo poles, rope and fabric. They spread a blue tablecloth by the teepee and called it their fishing pond. Indoors, the children create with blocks, yarn, tape, markers, paint, musical instruments and other items.
“You can’t be stagnant,” Ibsen says. “You’ve got to stay tuned in with what’s going on.”
Providence Day does that by making sure teachers participate in professional development programs and by “looking around and talking to colleagues” to see what other schools are doing, Ibsen explains. One thing he sees is schools filling gaps for students who don’t get enough exercise elsewhere.
Encouraging Kids to Do for Themselves
Among the realities Providence Day is responding to is child obesity, which continues to be a widely recognized problem, according to Kyle Snow, director of the Center for Applied Research at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. In addition, therapists and physical education teachers such as Oglesby observe children with insufficient upper-body strength. Some teachers encounter children who have difficulty gripping a pencil properly because of insufficient small-motor skills, Oglesby says. After testing in several elementary school classrooms, Angela Hanscom, a pediatric occupational therapist in New Hampshire, says only one in 12 students compared favorably with children from the early 1980s in strength and balance.
Many developments have conspired to push children into more sedentary lives.
“Kids are so tuned into technology, and we don’t tend to let them outside to play as much as they used to,” observes Judy Shincarick, director of the occupational and physical therapy departments at the Lab School of Washington.
Typing at a computer develops fine-motor skills by requiring children’s fingers to do different things at the same time, Shincarick says. But other fine-motor skills suffer when computers replace handwriting, coloring, working jigsaw puzzles, stringing beads and other physical play, she adds. And too much time at a computer or television screen means too little time exercising large muscles in vigorous physical play.
Physical development also can be hindered by the fast-paced lives of families with two working parents, Parker and Brice say. Parents may lack the time to take their children outside to play. Rushed lives can lead parents to do too much for their children in order to save time.
“Children aren’t allowed to struggle to put on their coat and pants” or to tie their shoes, Brice says. “They need to problem-solve for themselves.” And, Parker adds, “make mistakes.”
Even health and safety advances can have negative consequences.
The latest car seats can carry a child from inside the home to the car outside, leading kids to spend too much time in one position, Brice says. Putting infants to sleep on their backs—to prevent sudden infant death syndrome—deprives them of the exercise they get while moving on their stomach, she adds. That makes it essential for children to get ample “tummy time” while awake.
Parental fear of injury or foul play can deprive children of unstructured out-of-doors play. Educators’ fears of student injury—and legal liability—can stifle children’s physical activity at school. And demands for high academic achievement have led many schools to reduce or eliminate recess, which actually diminishes students’ academic prowess as well as physical fitness.
Studies show that unstructured outdoor play in a natural environment is associated with self-control and academic achievement, Snow says. In unstructured play, children must exercise the self-control to decide what to do and how to do it, he explains. When playing in a group, they have to negotiate “some agreed-upon set of ideas that are going to keep us from destroying each other.”
Children tend to engage in more vigorous, spontaneous activity outside because they tend to face fewer adult-imposed rules than they do inside, Snow says. They tend to display more creativity in a natural environment, he adds.
“When you put a kid in front of a slide (in a traditional playground), two things can happen,” he says. “Either they go up the stairs or they go up the slide, and there’s only one thing they’re supposed to do.”
In contrast, Snow says, “put kids in with a couple of logs and trees and they’ll come up with all sorts of things to do. It’s not so obvious what I should do with a stump, so I can do anything with a stump. I can hide behind it, jump on top of it, climb on it, run around it, jump over it.”
Snow says he’s observed development of a “really broad movement” for creating natural playgrounds, which NCRC did recently.
Scattered around the NCRC playground—atop a surface of grass and woodchips—are logs, stumps, boulders and bales of straw. There’s dirt as well as sand for digging, and pots, pans and kitchen utensils for low-tech play. The children also can play on swings, slides and a climbing wall, and shoot at low-hanging basketball hoops.
More Nature—and Therapy
Some playground suppliers specialize in natural equipment, and some traditional suppliers carry natural or nature-like items.
One of the specialists is Nature Explore of Lincoln, Nebraska. In addition to equipment like that found on the NCRC playground, Nature Explore offers fabrics that children can drape over equipment to create make-believe rooms or buildings, says Heather Fox, the organization’s public education director. Open areas allow children to “run, roll or lie in the grass and look at the sky,” she says.
Metro Recreation, based near Frederick, Maryland, has encountered the growing interest in natural playgrounds that Snow describes, according to Mike Slifer, the company’s president.
Metro supplies equipment that is nature-like (rather than natural), such as logs, stumps, boulders and tree-like climbers made from glass-fiber reinforced concrete. Slifer pitches it as being more durable and requiring less maintenance than natural materials.
Metro also carries fitness-oriented equipment for children to climb, hang, jump and pull themselves up on. It comes with a curriculum that teachers can use to “get children to use it in the most demanding way,” Slifer says. For small-motor play, the company sells panels with knobs and dials for children to turn, and a tilting panel that children manipulate to guide a ball through a maze.
In addition to purchasing new equipment, some schools are beginning or increasing the provision of physical and occupational therapy. Brice began providing occupational therapy four hours a week at NCRC 17 years ago, for example, and now works 32 hours a week.
Managing Costs, Educating Parents
A challenge for schools is balancing students’ need for vigorous outdoor exercise with concerns about safety and cost.
At Providence Day, Oglesby addressed the safety director’s concerns about the youngest children’s use of climbing equipment by positioning the monkey bars and ropes lower than initially planned.
There are many ways schools can hold down costs, according to Shincarick of the Lab School.
One of the Lab School’s two campuses has a playground; the other takes advantage of a nearby public park. The school also utilizes public athletic fields and has been allowed to use the fields of a nearby university. Even without purchasing equipment, a school can use existing open space on campus as a natural playground, Shincarick says.
Shincarick extends the reach of therapists and phys ed teachers by showing classroom teachers how they can advance children’s fitness in their normal course of teaching. She tells teachers not to prepare a classroom before students arrive but to have the children set up as much as they can themselves, for example.
“Set it up so the children have to lift their art material off the shelf,” she says. “Those activities promote strength and engagement in what they are going to do.”
Parent education includes “saying that their children should be dressing themselves, pouring their own cereal, making messes and cleaning up the messes themselves.”
Marian Brice
National Child Research Center
Schools also can teach parents how to foster their children’s fitness, Shincarick says. “We can explain how they can do things at home and how they can find ways to do things in parks.”
According to Brice, parent education includes “saying that their children should be dressing themselves, pouring their own cereal, making messes and cleaning up the messes themselves.” NCRC also encourages parents to take their children to playgrounds and to enroll them in gymnastics and swimming classes. During bad weather, Parker says, parents can create an in-the-home playground with forts made from blankets, tables and chairs, and an obstacle course of household items and the parents’ own legs. Brice asks teachers to “keep reinforcing movement in the classroom,” such as by allowing children to stand when they don’t need to sit.
Providence Day invites parents to observe phys ed classes to learn what kinds of exercise their children need. In addition to investing in high-tech as well as more traditional exercise equipment, Oglesby discovered that young children enjoy simply pulling themselves up onto the gymnasium stage, running across the stage, running down steps off the stage, then repeating.
Acknowledging that natural materials require more maintenance than metal, plastics and concrete, Fox says some schools invite parents and their children to help treat the wood and care for the playground’s vegetation.
“We find that provides opportunity for parents and children and teachers to be more involved,” she says.
