Disorganized Sports + Unstructured Play

When asking children: 

What is your favorite part of school?

It is not uncommon to get this answer:  

Recess!!!

I still like to play :)

Sadly, in schools today, recess is on it's way toward extinction.  On a parenting group I belong to, student's back to school schedules were shared.  Sadly, very few included time for recess. Yet at a recent conference I listened to brain researcher John Medena  who shared that activity, movement, and exercise is crucial for boosting brain power.  Not only does play make you smarter, this article points to play being a great way to alleviate ADD / ADHD symptoms. Unfortunately, educators are in a state of panic in our test prep obsessed education system, no longer able to think clearly about what is truly best for our children. 

If today's teachers and administrators had the opportunity to pull themselves away from the worksheets and bubblesheets they would find that play is an essential component of student success as pointed to in the article Can We Play by Psychologist David Elkin.  In the article Elkin shares that recess is already extinct in more than 30,000 U.S. schools that have eliminated recess to make more time for academics and that children’s time spent outdoors has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s.
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