Director’s Column: COVID-19 Crisis Reinforces the Importance of Play
By Jennifer Winters, Director
The prolonged COVID-19 crisis restrictions have certainly changed everyone’s world. It has also sharpened our focus on what’s important.
For the children and families that we serve, the crisis has highlighted the short window of opportunity to maximize a young child’s development, confirmed the critical importance of play in overall development, and shown what it’s like when a child’s daily play in nursery school is removed.
Serving young children and their families with our play-based curriculum is a primary reason for Bing’s existence, and in the 55-year history of our school we’ve never been closed for anywhere near this long. Following our sudden closure in March, there were times we actually wondered “if” rather than “when” our school would reopen. So when, on Sept. 16, we were finally able to open our doors to children again—with new health, safety, and operating guidelines—all of us at Bing experienced an even greater sense of joy and satisfaction.
I’d like to express our deepest thanks to the entire Bing community of families and friends for their very generous and immediate support of the Bing Emergency Fund. This fund, established shortly after we closed, is what has kept us going and enabled us to reopen. Without it, we would not be where we are today.
The “perfect storm” of a sudden and prolonged school closure and the resulting loss of tuition revenue posed a threat to our very existence. The Bing community’s response to the Emergency Fund was overwhelming, and the result is that we have been able to reopen without having made a single layoff. I speak for all of us when I say we are truly humbled to be serving a community that so values what we do.
I’d like to elaborate on the importance of being able to keep all of our teachers and staff throughout this crisis. I’m frequently asked by parents and visiting educators what makes Bing such a special place, a place that has been able to consistently provide a rich, early-childhood educational experience for over half a century. My answer is always “our teachers and staff.” The accumulated early-childhood wisdom, knowledge and practice of our teachers and staff make a difference for both children and parents. It’s that wisdom and knowledge that is put into practice in our classrooms and communicated to parents. Our teachers and staff are our “secret sauce.”
I would like to thank and acknowledge our teachers and staff for all of their detailed planning and hard work during the shutdown to ensure that we were able to implement our play-based curriculum under the new operating guidelines from state licensing and the university, without sacrificing any quality and while adhering to the highest standards for health and safety. The guidelines changed often, including the week before opening, but our team was able to respond to every new requirement.
I would also like to thank and acknowledge several family members of current and past Bing children: Dr. Paul Mohabir, Dr. Ryan Padrez, Dr. Yvonne Maldonado and Dr. Robert Luo. They are all working on the front lines of the COVID crisis and generously volunteered to work with us on our health and safety plans. I would be remiss if I failed to thank Stanford University’s Russell Furr, Associate Vice Provost for Environmental Health and Safety, and Dr. Rich Wittman, Medical Director of the Stanford University Occupational Health Center, for arranging weekly COVID-19 tests for teachers—and, additionally, Steve Olson, Senior Associate Dean for Finance and Faculty Affairs in Humanities and Sciences, for guiding us all along the way. They have been invaluable!
Our new operating guidelines have required us to make changes to our program that, most unfortunately, have reduced the total number of children and families we can serve. We hope the guidelines will change and allow us to add more children to the classrooms, but for now our three nursery school classrooms have a maximum allowable cohort of 24 children with five teachers. The Twos room cohort is currently 12 children and three teachers. Only five-day sessions are allowed in the nursery school classrooms. We are able to operate a morning and afternoon session in each classroom, but each cohort of children and teachers must remain consistent for the five days. Classrooms and materials are disinfected between morning and afternoon sessions, and again at the end of the day. Because of health and safety concerns, parents, guardians and caregivers are not allowed into the school: They pick up and drop off children at entry/exit points that are unique for each classroom. All the staff and children (including the 2-year-olds) wear masks—which hasn’t slowed down their play at all!
While we regret serving fewer children under the new guidelines, we have the maximum number of children currently allowed in each session. In the first two weeks of school, the new drop-off and pick-up procedures have gone very smoothly, even more so than expected. And, while we wish parents could come into the school to see their children playing, learning and having fun, we can assure you that the children have proven exceptionally resilient to any effects of the extended lockdown and have embraced with a passion the new time, spaces and opportunities to play.
Watching the first few days, we can confirm the intrinsic nature of play in young children and can convey what being back at Bing means to them and to us. In the words of a parent of one of the children at Bing: “Since the reopening, I’m seeing Claren’s biggest smile and excitement. Beyond happiness, I see the immediate return of creativity, curiosity about the world and passion in life inspired by the magical Bing experience. The interpersonal relationships and communication have enriched Claren’s perspectives—the songs she composed changed from a bittersweet tone of missing her friends to talking about love and dreams. It also sparks her creativity—since the first day returning to school, she picks up building blocks again and spends more than two hours every day on building at home. Two weeks into school, she is bringing back the wood works from Bing to enrich her block projects from a house to a city.”
At Bing, our play-based, child-centered curriculum is built on our belief that self-directed play is what best promotes a young child’s development across all domains—cognitive, social, emotional and physical. Young children learn by doing, and playing is doing. Through active play, children are stretching themselves across all these important developmental areas, often across many simultaneously.
The window of opportunity to very positively impact a young child’s development is brief, and we have an obligation to make the most it. A child’s brain reaches 80% of its size by age 3, is almost fully developed by age 5, and by age 7 all of the synapses in the brain will be formed. Synapses are the connections between the neurons, or brain cells, forming our human computer-like system that will enable future learning and the development of educational ability. Recent evidence has shown that real-world, 3-D play by young children is what best creates those synapses in their brain and maximizes its development.
Bing’s founding principles are:
- Treating every child as an honored guest
- Giving children the gift of time
- Giving children freedom of movement
The closure of the school and the extended lockdown of families and children have clearly shown why these principles remain as relevant today as they were a half-century ago!
The “gift of time” and “freedom of movement” are essential for the development of young children in our modern world, where opportunities for real-world play continue to decrease.
Young children have a natural curiosity about the world around them and an inherent desire to explore it. They want to move around, to touch and feel, using all of their senses. The best way to encourage young children to learn through play is by giving them the time to play, the freedom to move about, and by providing open-ended materials that allow them to exercise their creativity and imagination. Watching young children moving around their environment—interacting with peers, grasping, manipulating and examining a new object, painting on a blank sheet of paper or building with unit blocks—is to see them engaged, exploring, discovering and learning. In all of these examples, what’s clear is that young children learn best using all of their senses in the physical world and with the fewest constraints on their imagination.
The past six months of sheltering-in-place have shown us that young children have been particularly impacted. While their opportunities to play, explore, discover and interact with the world around them have been limited, the good news is—observed in the first days back at school—their desire to play has not at all diminished, and they are embracing this renewed freedom of movement and this gift of time. Play is just what our young children need for their development, and the children are embracing their newfound play with a passion. It is magical to see.
Learning through play is integral to our philosophy and practice of early childhood education. While this crisis has forced all of us to adapt to new realities, a silver lining has been that it has reinforced the importance of play. While much has changed, the need for young children to play has not. This should be one of our top lessons for 2020.
