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El Cerrito Preschool Cooperative

El Cerrito Preschool Cooperative

Play, Learn and Grow at ECPC

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Parent Resources

How to handle “gun” play

March 8, 2016

It’s hard to spend much time around a preschool — and we as parent participators at ECPC spend plenty — and not encounter the issue of kids playing at fighting and shooting.

It’s almost automatic to interpret these games in grownup terms (“we don’t shoot people!”), but it is, after all, child’s play. And, as it turns out, there are good reasons to just let the kids be kids. Among them: evidence that freedom to indulge in play fighting may correspond with better impulse control and less aggression in real life.*

Check out the following article from The Atlantic. Click through to read the whole article, or scroll down for some key excerpts.


Keeping Kids From Toy Guns: How One Mother Changed Her Mind

When my husband was growing up, the only boy in a family of all girls, his mother didn’t allow him to have any toy guns. He was a mild mannered, sweet little boy. But when he was five years old, he ran over to his friend’s house and “borrowed” one of the toy guns he had played with over there and coveted, stashing it in his bedroom.

… [I]n the U.S. we vilify children for even being interested in playing with guns. In the past six months alone, a little boy in Massachusetts was given detention and forced to write a letter of apology for having a tiny, Lego toy gun on a school bus; a five year old in Maryland was given ten days of suspension for having a toy gun at school, interrogated for so long he wet his pants in the principal’s office; elementary school students in Washington were suspended for shooting off Nerf guns that their teacher had actually asked them to bring in for an experiment in probability; and in California, an elementary school announced a plan to “buy back” toy guns in exchange for books. Little boys bear the brunt of our panic over toy weapons, but girls are not immune either: a five-year-old girl in Pennsylvania was suspended from school and made to undergo psychiatric evaluation when she threatened to shoot a classmate with a toy Hello Kitty soap bubble gun – a toy she hadn’t even brought to school.

We didn’t always used to frown upon weapon play; children of the 1950s grew up steeped in television shows showing gun-toting heroes like the Lone Ranger, and toy soldiers and cowboy costumes were common playthings. But societal panic intensified in the wake of a spate of tragic school shootings in the 1990s, and a shift towards zero tolerance policies and regulating how children should play has been steadily increasing ever since. …

Although many of us in America worry that gun play desensitizes kids to violence, the research doesn’t bear this out. In fact, it can actually help teach children to read each other’s facial cues and body language, figure out their place in a group, and learn how to adjust their behavior in social settings. Play helps children learn how to signal each other: this is fantasy. As Mechling explains, using the theories of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, when children are playing with toy guns, they do so within a play frame they have created, one in which “a shooting is not a shooting.” Children don’t see their own play through the lens that adults do. To children, gun play is play, while to American adults–especially in the post-Columbine or Newtown era–gun play is violence.

When children are engaged in play they choose, they are more engaged and motivated to sustain it for longer. Imaginary play hones self-regulation, which is essential for school success but has declined in recent decades. (Today’s five year olds have the self-regulation skills of a three year old 60 years ago). Research has found that incorporating preschool boys’ interest in weapon play rather than banning it entirely leads them to play longer, more elaborate games that go beyond mere weapon play. The British government, in fact, concerned by a pattern of preschool boys falling behind girls in part due to zero-tolerance policies that had led teachers to curb any hint of boisterous play, advised preschools to allow boys to play with toy weapons and other play of their choosing, since the research suggests that acknowledging their interests will help them feel more engaged in school and improve their academic performance.

There is no question that I’d rather have my sons read a book than play with a toy gun, and there is no easy answer when my Japanese friends wonder at the paradox of our banning gun play when we do not ban the guns that kill thousands of children and teens in the U.S. each year. Does the debatable benefit in banning the toys outweigh the harm in shaming young children for the imaginary play they’re drawn to, giving them the message that they aren’t good enough as they are, that their interests are wrong, and that their play isn’t of value unless they play the way adults deem appropriate? …


*Source: “In a 2013 study, researchers observed how preschoolers played by themselves with various objects and then watched these same children in their classrooms. They found that the more oral aggression the kids displayed—for example, pretending that stuffed animals bit or ate each other—the less aggressive their behavior was in the classroom. The researchers speculate that when kids incorporate violence into their pretend play, they may learn how to control real violent impulses and regulate their emotions. Another recent paper penned by academic psychologists went so far as to argue that preventing kids from play fighting could interfere with their social, emotional, physical, cognitive, and communicative development.”

—“It’s Fine for Kids to Play With Pretend Guns. In fact, it might be good for them.”
Slate.com, July 2, 2015

Filed Under: News, Parent Resources Tagged With: child development, parent education, play

Research supports play-based learning

May 1, 2015

Recent child development research indicates that academic preschool may be harming children’s ability to think creatively. This research supports play-based early learning like the El Cerrito Preschool Cooperative has offered for decades. The article below discusses cutting-edge studies about why child-led play actually supports long-term learning.

Why Preschool Shouldn’t Be Like School
New research shows that teaching kids more and more, at ever-younger ages, may backfire.
By Alison Gopnik
Slate.com

Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they’re reading books to babies in the womb. They pressure teachers to make kindergartens and nurseries more like schools. So does the law — the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act explicitly urged more direct instruction in federally funded preschools.

There are skeptics, of course, including some parents, many preschool teachers, and even a few policy-makers. Shouldn’t very young children be allowed to explore, inquire, play, and discover, they ask? Perhaps direct instruction can help children learn specific facts and skills, but what about curiosity and creativity — abilities that are even more important for learning in the long run? Two forthcoming studies in the journal Cognition — one from a lab at MIT and one from my lab at UC-Berkeley — suggest that the doubters are on to something. While learning from a teacher may help children get to a specific answer more quickly, it also makes them less likely to discover new information about a problem and to create a new and unexpected solution.

Read More

Filed Under: News, Parent Resources Tagged With: parent education, play, research

Must-read article: “Give childhood back to children”

February 11, 2015

We read an excellent article recently on play and education. The beginning is excerpted below, but we highly recommend you click the link to read the whole article.

Give childhood back to children: if we want our offspring to have happy, productive and moral lives, we must allow more time for play, not less
Because students spend nearly all of their time studying, they have little opportunity to be creative or discover their own passions
By PETER GRAY
The Independent

I’m a research bio-psychologist with a PhD, so I’ve done lots of school. I’m a pretty good problem-solver, in my work and in the rest of my life, but that has little to do with the schooling I’ve had. I studied algebra, trig, calculus and various other maths in school, but I can’t recall ever facing a problem – even in my scientific research – that required those skills. What maths I’ve used was highly specialised and, as with most scientists, I learnt it on the job.

The real problems I’ve faced in life include physical ones (such as how to operate a newfangled machine at work or unblock the toilet at home), social ones (how to get that perfect woman to be interested in me), moral ones (whether to give a passing grade to a student, for effort, though he failed all the tests), and emotional ones (coping with grief when my first wife died or keeping my head when I fell through the ice while pond skating). Most problems in life cannot be solved with formulae or memorised answers of the type learnt in school. They require the judgement, wisdom and creative ability that come from life experiences. For children, those experiences are embedded in play.

I’m lucky. I grew up in the United States in the 1950s, at the tail end of what the historian Howard Chudacoff refers to as the “golden age” of children’s free play. The need for child labour had declined greatly, decades earlier, and adults had not yet begun to take away the freedom that children had gained. We went to school, but it wasn’t the big deal it is today. School days were six hours long, but (in primary school) we had half-hour recesses in the morning and afternoon, and an hour at lunch. Teachers may or may not have watched us, from a distance, but if they did, they rarely intervened. We wrestled on the school grounds, climbed trees in the adjacent woods, played with knives and had snowball wars in winter – none of which would be allowed today at any state-run school I know of. Out of school, we had some chores and some of us had part-time jobs such as paper rounds (which gave us a sense of maturity and money of our own); but, for the most part, we were free – free to play for hours each day after school, all day on weekends, and all summer long. Homework was non-existent in primary school and minimal in secondary school. There seemed to be an implicit understanding, then, that children need lots of time and freedom to play.

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Filed Under: Parent Resources Tagged With: parent education, play

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7200 Moeser Lane, El Cerrito, CA 94530
(510) 526-1916
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  • About
    • About ECPC
    • Our Philosophy
    • Our Teachers
    • Our Facilities
    • Upcoming Events
      • Pumpkin Promenade
    • History of ECPC
  • Co-op Life
    • Parent Involvement
    • Messy Art Day
    • Videos
    • Photos
    • Alumni
  • Admissions
    • AM and PM Programs
    • Open Houses
    • Enrollment
    • Tuition
  • Support ECPC
    • Support ECPC
    • Wish List
  • Contact Us
    • Contact
    • Job Opportunities
  • Members Only