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  3. Can We Play? [A]Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone

Can We Play? [A]Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone

admin2013-11-11  26
问题                                Can We Play?
[A]Play is rapidly disappearing from our homes, our schools, and our neighborhoods. Over the last two decades alone, children have lost eight hours of free, unstructured, and spontaneous play a week. Decades of research has shown that play is crucial to physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all ages.
[B]With play on the decline, we risk losing these and many other benefits. For too long, we have treated play as a luxury that kids, as well as adults, could do without. But the time has come for us to recognize why play is worth defending: If is essential to leading a happy and healthy life.
Play and development
[C]Years of research has confirmed the value of play. In early childhood, play helps children develop skills they can not get in any other way. At the preschool level, children engage in dramatic play and learn who is a leader, who is a follower, who is outgoing, who is shy. They also learn to negotiate their own conflicts.
[D]A 2007 report from the American Academy of Pediatrics documents that play promotes not only behavioral development but brain growth as well. The University of North Carolina’s Abecedarian Early Child Intervention program found that children who received an enriched, play-oriented parenting and early childhood program had significantly higher IQ’s at age five than did a comparable group of children who were not in the program(105 vs. 85 points).
[E]A large body of research evidence also supports the value and importance of particular types of play. For example, Israeli psychologist Sara Smilansky’s classic studies of sociodramatic play, where two or more children participate in shared make believe(虚构), demonstrate the value of this play for academic, social, and emotional learning. "Sociodramatic play activates resources that stimulate social and intellectual growth in the child, which in turn affects the child’s success in school," concludes Smilansky in a 1990 study that compared American and Israeli children.
[F]Other research illustrates the importance of physical play for children’s learning and development. Some of these studies have highlighted the importance of recess(休息). Psychologist Anthony Pellegrini and his colleagues have found that elementary school children become increasingly distractible in class when recess is delayed. Similarly, studies conducted in French and Canadian elementary schools over a period of four years found that regular physical activity had positive effects on academic performance. Spending one third of the school day in physical education, art, and music improved not only physical fitness, but attitudes toward learning and test scores. These findings echo those from one analysis of 200 studies on the effects of exercise on cognitive functioning, which also suggests that physical activity promotes learning.
[G]In recent years, and most especially since the 2002 passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, we’ve seen educators, policy makers, and many parents embrace the idea that early academics leads to greater success in life.
[H]Yet several studies by Kathy Hirsch-Pasek and colleagues have compared the performance of children attending academic preschools with those attending play-oriented preschools. The results showed no edge in reading and math achievement for children attending the academic preschools. But there was evidence that those children had higher levels of test anxiety, were less creative, and had more negative attitudes toward school than did the children attending the play preschools. So if play is that important, why is it disappearing?
The perfect storm
[I]The decline of children’s free, self-initiated play is the result of a perfect storm of technological innovation, rapid social change, and economic globalization.
[J]Technological innovations have led to the all-pervasiveness of television and computer screens in our society in gen-eral, and in our homes in particular. An unintended consequence of this invasion is that childhood has moved indoors. Children who might once have enjoyed a pick-up game of baseball in an empty lot now watch the game on TV, sitting on their couch.
[K]Meanwhile, single and working parents now outnumber the once-predominant nuclear family, in which a stay-at-home mother could provide the kind of loose oversight that facilitates free play. Instead, busy working parents outsource(外包)at least some of their former responsibilities to coaches, tutors, trainers, martial arts teachers, and other professionals. As a result, middle-income children spend more of their free time on adult-led and-organized activities than any earlier generation.(Low-income youth sometimes have the opposite problem: Their parents may not have the means to put them in high-quality programs that provide alternatives to playing in unsafe neighborhoods.)
[L]Finally, a global economy has increased parental fears about their children’s prospects in an increasingly high-tech marketplace. Many middle-class parents have bought into the idea that education is a race, and that the earlier you start your child in academics, the better. Preschool tutoring in math and programs such as the Kumon System, which emphasizes daily drills in math and reading, are becoming increasingly popular. And all too many kindergartens, once dedicated to learning through play, have become full-day academic institutions that require testing and homework. In such a world, play has come to be seen as a waste of precious time. A 1999 survey found that nearly a third of kindergarten classes did not have a recess period.
[M]As adults have increasingly thwarted(反对)self-initiated play and games, we have lost important markers of the stages in a child’s development. In the absence of such markers, it is difficult to determine what is appropriate and not appropriate for children. We run the risk of pushing them into certain activities before they are ready, or preventing the development of important intellectual, social, or emotional skills.
[N]For example, it is only after the age of six or seven that children will spontaneously participate in games with rules, because it is only at that age that they are fully able to understand and follow rules. Those kinds of developmental markers fall by the wayside when we slot very young kids into activities such as Little League. When Little League was founded in 1939, the adult organizers looked to children themselves in setting the starting age, which ended up being about age nine or older. But the success of Little League was not lost on parents eager to find supervised activities for young children. Before long, team soccer was promoted for younger children because it was an easier and less complex game for the six to nine-year-old age group. The rapid growth of soccer leagues challenged the popularity of Little League. This led to the introduction of Tee Ball, a simplified version of baseball for children as young as four.
[O]By pushing young children into team sports for which they are not developmentally ready, we rule out forms of play that once encouraged them to learn skills of independence and creativity. Instead of learning on their own in backyards, fields, and on sidewalks, children are only learning to do what adults tell them to do. Moreover, one study found that many children who start playing soccer at age four are burned out on that sport by the time they reach adolescence, just the age when they might truly enjoy and excel at it.
From the results of Kathy and his colleagues’ studies, we can know that the children attending academic preschools have no advantage in reading and math performance.
选项
答案H
解析 根据题干中的the results以及children attending academic preschools将本题出处定位于[H]段第2句。题干中的no advantage in reading and math performance对应文中的no edge in reading and math achievement。文中的Theresults指的是Kathy及其同事们所进行的研究的结果，本句意为“结果显示参加学前教育的孩子在阅读和数学成绩方面并没有优势”。
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