Reply to How much unstructured play time does your MCPS kindergartner have during the school day?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Our ES K (rockville cluster) did have some unstructured play time. The classroom my child was in had a small kitchen area, a rice table, and an area with magnatiles and other blocks. It was part of a rotation that included a literacy center. Not sure how long they got or if it was daily, but I loved that they had some play time besides recess.[/quote]

This has been our experience too, also in the Rockville cluster. 30 minutes recess plus “play” built into rotations throughout the day. When I volunteered in the classroom, kids moved through activities like copying words, doing puzzles, cutting and pasting, house keeping corner, and teacher-led bingo (learning letter names and sounds). Most of the day was certainly focused on more academic centers, but some centers were open-ended and there was a “choice” time built into the schedule.

This year in first grade, there’s still some time for legos and Lincoln logs (and writing about the things they create).

They’ve also been moving away from homework other than encouraging nightly reading.

I’m definitely in the play-is-good camp, but both of my young-for-grade boys handled K in MCPS we’ll.[/quote]

Which elem school in Rockville is this? Sounds great.[/quote]

This was the experience that my son had in an MCPS Kindergarten as well.  Math center could mean playing with dominoes or blocks.  While this is not totally unstructured, it's just the right amount of structure in my opinion.  Not everyone can play with the blocks at the same time.  Centers allow all children to rotate through.  Children develop a sense of waiting their turn and playing with someone who may not be their best friend already.  There was a lot more play than I anticipated based upon MCPS' reputation.[/quote]

Sounds a lot like our Silver Spring ES (a Focus school), although that was 5 years ago. There was lots of movement through the day, and very little sit-at-your-desk-and-work time, although there was a fair amount of time sitting on the carpet when the teacher was presenting a new concept. But even though they had free time where they could choose their centers, the teacher did a good job of linking their "play" to the other things they were learning, without them actually realizing it. One of the centers was a play store where they could practice identifying and counting coins, and another one was a kitchen with all the items labeled in simple words they could recognize. I don't think there was a ton of daily Chromebook time, but they certainly worked with them on a regular basis. I definitely remember her coming home talking about lots of other things. [/quote]

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