More Playtime! How Kids Succeed with Recess Four Times a Day at School
Journey Orebaugh, a 6-year-old in an off-white princess dress, is playing family.
“You just get a bunch of people and just act like who you want to be,” she says. Journey likes to play the mom.
But in one sense, recess at Eagle Mountain is different. Journey gets more opportunities to role-play than many of her peers, because recess happens a lot here — four times a day, 15 minutes a pop for kindergartners and first-graders.
That’s much more time on the playground than most public school kids get in the U.S. Over the past couple of decades, trends show schools have cut recess time to make room for tests and test prep.
Ask Journey why she and her friends get so much more recess time and she giggles. “Lucky,” she says.
But ask the adults and they’ll tell you it’s because Eagle Mountain is part of a project in which the school day is modeled after the Finnish school system, which consistently scores at or near the top in international education rankings. The project’s designer is Texas Christian University kinesiologist Debbie Rhea.
“I went over there to find out where they’ve come in the last 20 to 25 years. Yes, their test scores are good, but they are also healthy in many regards,” she says.
The biggest difference Rhea noticed was that students in Finland get much more recess than American kids do. “So, I came back with the idea to bring recess back to the schools. Not just one recess, but multiple recesses.”
This year Eagle Mountain Elementary started tripling recess time, from 20 minutes to an hour. The program also focuses on character development –things like empathy and positive behavior.
Rhea is working with a handful of local schools already. More will join next year in Texas, California and Oklahoma.
Teachers at Eagle Mountain say they’ve seen a huge transformation in their students. They say kids are less distracted, they make more eye contact and they tattle less.
And then there are the pencils.
“You know why I was sharpening them? Because they were grinding on them, they were breaking them, they were chewing on them. They’re not More Playtime! How Kids Succeed with Recess Four Times a Day at School | MindShift | KQED News:
