{"id":1719,"date":"2021-04-29T13:07:00","date_gmt":"2021-04-29T13:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teachlands.com\/?p=1719"},"modified":"2022-09-24T22:21:59","modified_gmt":"2022-09-24T22:21:59","slug":"the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachlands.com\/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland\/","title":{"rendered":"The Joyful, Illiterate Kindergartners of Finland"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[Author’s note: My first online course\u2014The Joyful Reader: Teach Your Child to Read the Finnish Way<\/a> \u2014<\/em><\/strong> is now available!]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cThe changes to kindergarten make me sick,\u201d a veteran teacher in Arkansas recently admitted to me. \u201cThink about what you did in first grade\u2014that\u2019s what my 5-year-old babies are expected to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference between first grade and kindergarten may not seem like much, but what I remember about my first-grade experience in the mid-90s doesn\u2019t match the kindergarten she described in her email: three and a half hours of daily literacy instruction, an hour and a half of daily math instruction, 20 minutes of daily \u201cphysical activity time\u201d (officially banned from being called \u201crecess\u201d) and two 56-question standardized tests in literacy and math\u2014on the fourth week of school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That American friend\u2014who teaches 20 students without an aide\u2014has fought to integrate 30 minutes of \u201cstation time\u201d into the literacy block, which includes  \u201cblocks, science, magnetic letters, play dough with letter stamps to practice words, books, and storytelling.\u201d But the most controversial area of her classroom isn\u2019t the blocks nor the stamps: Rather, it\u2019s the \u201chouse station with dolls and toy food\u201d\u2014items her district tried to remove last year. The implication was clear: There\u2019s no time for play in kindergarten anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A working paper, \u201cIs Kindergarten the New First Grade?,\u201d <\/a>confirms what many experts have suspected for years: The American kindergarten experience has become much more academic\u2014and at the expense of play. The late psychologist, Bruno Bettelheim, even raised the concern in an article for The Atlantic<\/em><\/a> in 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Researchers at the University of Virginia, led by the education-policy researcher Daphna Bassok, analyzed survey responses from American kindergarten teachers between 1998 and 2010. \u201cAlmost every dimension that we examined,\u201d noted Bassok, \u201chad major shifts over this period towards a heightened focus on academics, and particularly a heightened focus on literacy, and within literacy, a focus on more advanced skills than what had been taught before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the study, the percentage of kindergarten teachers who reported that they agreed (or strongly agreed) that children should learn to read in kindergarten greatly increased from 30 percent in 1998 to 80 percent in 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bassok and her colleagues found that while time spent on literacy in American kindergarten classrooms went up, time spent on arts, music, and child-selected activities (like station time) significantly dropped. Teacher-directed instruction also increased, revealing what Bassok described as \u201cstriking increases in the use of textbooks and worksheets\u2026 and very large increases in the use of assessments.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Finland\u2014a Nordic nation of 5.5 million people, where I\u2019ve lived and taught fifth and sixth graders over the last two years<\/a>\u2014appears to be on the other end of the kindergarten spectrum. Before moving to Helsinki, I had heard that most Finnish children start compulsory, government-paid kindergarten\u2014or what Finns call \u201cpreschool\u201d\u2014at age 6. And not only that, but I learned through my Finnish mother-in-law\u2014a preschool teacher\u2014that Finland\u2019s kindergartners spend a sizable chunk of each day playing, not filling out worksheets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finnish schools have received substantial media attention<\/a> for years now\u2014largely because of the consistently strong performance of its 15-year-olds on international tests like the PISA<\/a>. But I haven\u2019t seen much coverage on Finland\u2019s youngest students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, a month ago, I scheduled a visit to a Finnish public kindergarten\u2014where a typical school day is just four hours long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Want to teach reading playfully, Finland-style? Check out my course, The Joyful Reader<\/a>!<\/em><\/strong>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Approaching the school\u2019s 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\u2019s playground, the young children didn\u2019t even lift their eyes from the ground; they  just kept dragging and pushing their tiny shovels through the mud.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At 9:30 a.m., the boys were called to line up for a daily activity called Morning Circle. (The girls were already inside\u2014having chosen to play boardgames indoors.) They trudged across the yard in their rubber boots, pleading with their teachers to play longer\u2014even though they had already been outside for an hour. As they stood in file, I asked them to describe what they\u2019d been doing on the playground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMaking dams,\u201d sang a chorus of three boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNothing else?\u201d one of their teachers prodded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNothing else,\u201d they confirmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c[Children] learn so well through play,\u201d Anni-Kaisa Osei Ntiamoah, one of the preschool\u2019s \u201ckindergarten\u201d teachers, who\u2019s in her seventh year in the classroom, told me. \u201cThey don\u2019t even realize that they are learning because they\u2019re so interested [in what they\u2019re doing].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When children play, Osei Ntiamoah continued, they\u2019re developing their language, math, and social-interaction skills. A recent research summary<\/a> \u201cThe Power of Play\u201d supports her findings: \u201cIn the short and long term, play benefits cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development\u2026When play is fun and child-directed, children are motivated to engage in opportunities to learn,\u201d the researcher concluded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Osei Ntiamoah\u2019s colleagues all seemed to share her enthusiasm for play-based learning, as did the school\u2019s director, Maarit Reinikka: \u201cIt\u2019s not a natural way for a child to learn when the teacher says, \u2018Take this pencil and sit still.\u2019\u201d The school\u2019s kindergarten educators have their students engage in desk work\u2014like handwriting\u2014just one day a week. Reinikka, who directs several preschools in Kuopio, assured me that kindergartners throughout Finland\u2014like the ones at Niirala Preschool\u2014are rarely sitting down to complete traditional paper-and-pencil exercises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there\u2019s no such thing as a typical day of kindergarten at the preschool, the teachers said. Instead of a daily itinerary, two of them showed me a weekly schedule with no more than several major activities per day: Mondays, for example, are dedicated to field trips, ballgames, and running, while Fridays\u2014the day I visited\u2014are for songs and stations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once Morning Circle\u2014a communal time of songs and chants\u2014wrapped up, the children disbanded and flocked to the station of their choice: There was one involving fort-making with bed sheets, one for arts and crafts, and one where kids could run a pretend ice-cream shop. \u201cI\u2019ll take two scoops of pear and two scoops of strawberry\u2014in a waffle cone,\u201d I told the two kindergarten girls who had positioned themselves at the ice-cream table; I had a (fake) 10\u20ac bill to spend, courtesy of one of the teachers. As one of the girls served me\u2014using blue tack to stick laminated cutouts of scoops together\u2014I handed the money to her classmate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a determined expression reminiscent of the boys in the mud with their shovels, the young cashier stared at the price list. After a long pause, one of her teachers\u2014perhaps sensing a good opportunity to step in\u2014helped her calculate the difference between the price of my order and the 10\u20ac. Once I received my change (a few plastic coins), the girls giggled as I pretended to lick my ice cream.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the morning I noticed that the kindergartners played in two different ways: One was spontaneous and free form (like the boys building dams), while the other was more guided and pedagogical (like the girls selling ice cream).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact, Finland requires its kindergarten teachers to offer playful learning opportunities\u2014including both kinds of play\u2014to every kindergartner on a regular basis, according to Arja-Sisko Holappa, a counselor for the Finnish National Board of Education. What\u2019s more, Holappa, who also leads the development of the country\u2019s pre-primary core curriculum, said that play is being emphasized more than ever in latest version of that curriculum, which goes into effect in kindergartens next fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPlay is a very efficient way of learning for children,\u201d she told me. \u201cAnd we can use it in a way that children will learn with joy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The word \u201cjoy\u201d caught me off guard\u2014I\u2019m certainly not used to hearing the word in conversations about education in America, where I received my training and taught for several years. But Holappa, detecting my surprise, reiterated that the country\u2019s early-childhood education program indeed places a heavy emphasis on \u201cjoy,\u201d which along with play is explicitly written into the curriculum as a learning concept. “There’s an old Finnish saying,\u201d Holappa said. \u201cThose things you learn without joy you will forget easily.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[My Joyful Reader course<\/a> will teach you a child-centered approach to early reading instruction. Find out more here!<\/a>]<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After two hours of visiting a Finnish kindergarten, I still hadn\u2019t seen children reading. I was, however, hearing a lot of pre-literacy instruction sprinkled throughout the morning\u2014clapping out syllables and rhyming in Morning Circle, for example. I recalled learning in my master\u2019s degree courses in education that building phonemic awareness\u2014an ability to recognize sounds without involving written language\u2014was viewed as the groundwork of literacy development<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just before lunch, a kindergarten teacher took out a basket brimming with children\u2019s books. But for these 5- and 6-year-olds, \u201creading\u201d looked just like how my two toddlers approach their books: The kindergartners, sitting in different corners of the room, flipped through pages, savoring the pictures but, for the most part, not actually deciphering the words. Osei Ntiamoah told me that just one of the 15 students in her class can currently read syllable by syllable. Many of them, she added, will read by the end of the year. \u201cWe don\u2019t push them but they learn just because they are ready for it. If the child is willing and interested, we will help the child.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a time in Finland\u2014in the not so distant past\u2014when kindergarten teachers weren\u2019t even allowed to teach reading. This was viewed as the job of the first-grade teacher. But, as with America, things have changed: Nowadays, Finnish teachers are free to teach reading if they determine a child is\u2014just as Osei Ntiamoah put it\u2014\u201cwilling and interested\u201d to learn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout Finland, kindergarten teachers and parents meet during the fall to make an individualized learning plan, shaped by each child\u2019s interests and levels of readiness, which could include the goal of learning how to read. For Finnish kindergartners who seem primed for reading instruction, Holappa told me it\u2019s still possible to teach them in a playful manner. She recommended the work<\/a> of the Norwegian researcher Arne Trageton\u2014a pioneer in the area of play-based literacy instruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile across the Atlantic, kindergarten students like that of the Arkansas teacher are generally expected\u2014by the end of the year\u2014to master literacy skills that are far more complex, like reading books with two to three sentences of unpredictable text per page. \u201cThese are 5- to 6-year-olds!\u201d the Arkansas teacher wrote in disbelief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than 40 states\u2014including Arkansas\u2014have adopted the Common Core State Standards, which contain dozens of reading expectations for kindergartners. In the United States\u2014where 22 percent of the nation\u2019s children live in poverty<\/a> (more than 16 million in total)\u2014the Common Core\u2019s emphasis on rigorous language-learning in kindergarten could be viewed as a strategy for closing the alarming \u201cThirty Million Word Gap<\/a>\u201d between America\u2019s rich and poor\u2014holding schools accountable for having high expectations for their youngest students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Furthermore, unlike the reality of teaching kindergarten in Finland where the poverty rate is 10<\/a> percent and the student-teacher ratio is typically 14:1 (based on national guidelines), most American kindergarten teachers don\u2019t have a choice whether or not they teach reading. Under the Common Core, children should be able to \u201cread emergent-texts with purpose and understanding\u201d by the end of kindergarten. Ultimately, they\u2019re expected to, at the very least, be able to decode basic texts without the support of a teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut there isn\u2019t any solid evidence that shows that children who are taught to read in kindergarten have any long-term benefit from it,\u201d Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor emeritus of early childhood education at Lesley University, explained in a video published by the advocacy group Defending the Early Years<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Research by Sebastian Suggate, a former Ph.D. candidate at New Zealand\u2019s University of Otago studying educational psychology, confirms Carlsson-Paige\u2019s findings. One of Suggate\u2019s studies compared children from Rudolf Steiner schools\u2014who typically begin to read at the age of seven\u2014with children at state-run schools in New Zealand, who start reading at the age of five. By age 11, students from the former group caught up with their peers in the latter, demonstrating equivalent reading skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis research then raises the question,\u201d he said in an interview<\/a> published by the University of Otago. \u201cIf there aren\u2019t advantages to learning to read from the age of five, could there be disadvantages to starting teaching children to read earlier?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the end of my visit to the Finnish kindergarten, I joined the 22 children and their two teachers for a Friday event that only happens on weeks when children are celebrating their birthdays. The birthday child that week sat at the front of the classroom in a chair facing his peers and teachers, all of whom sat in a semicircle, and a table with a candleholder to his left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I expected the celebration to end after the lighting of candles and \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d song, but it didn\u2019t. One of the boy\u2019s classmates, donning a hat that looked like a beret and wearing a mail carrier\u2019s sling over his shoulder, took him by the hand, and the two proceeded to dance as we sang the Finnish children\u2019s song, \u201cLittle Boy Postman.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once the song was complete, the little postman took out a card and handed it to his classmate. \u201cWould you like me to help you read this?\u201d one of the birthday boy\u2019s teachers asked. \u201cYou help,\u201d he responded, a hint that hadn\u2019t quite mastered the skill yet. I watched his face carefully, searching for any hint of shame. I found none\u2014but then again, why should he have felt embarrassed?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The flickering six candles reminded me he\u2019s only a little kid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tim Walker is an American teacher, writer, and speaker living in Connecticut. He is the author of Teach Like Finland: 33 Simple Strategies for Joyful Classrooms and he created two online courses: The Finnish Education Insider<\/a> and The Joyful Reader<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Su<\/em><\/a>bscribe<\/a> to the Teachlands blog and follow Teachlands on Instagram<\/a> and Facebook<\/a>. And register for Tim’s free webinar about Finnish education here<\/a>!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a9 2015, Timothy D. Walker, as first published in <\/em>The Atlantic.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n