Children Are Not Getting Enough Time to Play at School

As a school counselor and a mom of little ones, I believe that not allowing kids to play and socialize is a bigger problem. The school district I work for requires at least 30 minutes of movement, um, per day. I wanna say that's, that's missing right there, but they only get 10 minutes of actual recess time. The remaining 20 minutes are allocated for transition times, such as walking to and from class, lining up and getting settled. This is concerning when my children misbehave. My, oh, this is concerning. I'm sorry. Then that's another question. Um, so I think the, I think the real question here is, um, are, do how much, you know, children need time to socialize and play, and her concern is that they're not getting that In school. Yeah, that's a really interesting, uh, observation and probably has probably a fair amount of research to back it up while children do better with frequent movements. So you may, uh, not, uh, be able to influence a school district's approach or a school's approach perhaps. But what you can do is help your child understand the value of their movement. And, and I, I, again, ideally, right, we may have these 10 minutes, but boy, I sure would wanna use those 10 minutes to their, to the fullest. But walking, moving between classes, I would also say even in class where you could actually do things and was this a school counselor? School counselor? Yeah. I, I think I would pull up a little bit of research and, and, and share it with administration on the benefits of movement and activity and see if we could, uh, encourage additional amount of time for movement and, and exercise, because we know that learning occurs, uh, way more learning occurs when we've had proper movement. An example of that, uh, in the book Spark, uh, John Ratey talked to R-A-T-E-Y. He talked about, uh, a school district in, uh, Illinois, I believe. And before school, they would give children these monitors and if they could get their resting heart rate up, one and a half times resting. So let's say resting is 65, let's say they went up into the mid nineties to up to a hundred for about 15 minutes. The optimal time for them to take a test after that is about two hours after that. And because it creates, uh, really good, uh, hormones and production. So mental clarity increases after, after we've had a, a moderate mild, you know, form of exercise about two hours later is our optimal mental time. And there's research to support that. So again, I would go to administrators, but I would also just consider that as kind of a guideline of, of let's get some research, share it with them. They may reject it, but it won't be because you didn't try and you didn't give them proper information. We can get so focused on what we're trying to do, that we actually take out the things that actually help them get to where they need to be. So, uh, John Brady's book, uh, spark has, has that story in it. Um, the research is, is pretty clear. Children do a lot better when they have frequent movement throughout the day. and especially in that case, they actually did it before school. But, again, I get as much research as possible to show the benefits of, uh, physical movement. It's especially important with children with A DHD for them to have left right hemisphere movement because the brain benefits when they're able to do right. Left hemisphere movements.