What 5-Year-Olds are Doing Overseas While Kindergartners in America Struggle with Common Core
Kindergartners in Finland don’t have to worry about learning complexCommon Core math problems like this:
Instead, they get to “play” much of the day. Tim Walker, an American educator who has been teaching fifth and sixth graders in Finland for the last few years recently wrote in The Atlantic that:
Approaching the school’s playground that morning, I watched as an army of 5- and 6-year-old boys patrolled a zigzagging stream behind Niirala Preschool in the city of Kuopio, unfazed by the warm August drizzle. When I clumsily unhinged the steel gate to the school’s playground, the young children didn’t even lift their eyes from the ground; they just kept dragging and pushing their tiny shovels through the mud.At 9:30 a.m., the boys were called to line up for a daily activity called Morning Circle. (The girls were already inside—having chosen to play boardgames indoors.) They trudged across the yard in their rubber boots, pleading with their teachers to play longer—even though they had already been outside for an hour. As they stood in file, I asked them to describe what they’d been doing on the playground.“Making dams,” sang a chorus of three boys.“Nothing else?” one of their teachers prodded.“Nothing else,” they confirmed.“[Children] learn so well through play,” Anni-Kaisa Osei Ntiamoah, one of the preschool’s ‘kindergarten’ teachers, who’s in her seventh year in the classroom, told me. “They don’t even realize that they are learning because they’re so interested [in what they’re doing].”
According to the article, most Finnish children start “preschool” when they are six years old. NPR notes that all preschool teachers have bachelor’s degrees, and because it is paid for by taxpayer money, 97% of eligible kids end up attending some form of preschool.
Osei Ntiamoah added that the interaction allows the students to develop their language, math and social-interaction skills.
A recent research study commissioned by the Minnesota Children’s Museum supports her findings. Dr. Rachel E. White, who managed the study for the museum, wrote:
“In the short and long term, play benefits cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development … When play is fun and child-directed, children are motivated to engage in opportunities to learn.”
Osei Ntiamoah’s colleagues also share her sentiments toward playtime. Added Maarit Reinnikka, the school’s director:
“It’s not a natural way for a child to learn when the teacher says, ‘Take this pencil and sit still’.”
Another major difference between Finnish and Americans schools is that Finnish teachers work from a weekly schedule that only includes a few major activities a day, rather than a daily itinerary broken down into regularly-scheduled periods like most American educators do.
Walker noted that the itinerary he was shown, for example, had the What 5-Year-Olds are Doing Overseas While Kindergartners in America Struggle with Common Core:
