Stay and play

About 100 students stay after school at Providence Hall Elementary to play chess, Legos, basketball and volleyball.

“If kids have a passion, and maybe it’s not something that is being met with outside extracurriculars, clubs or organizations, then if we can offer it, that’s great,” Principal Michael Fry said.

Club offerings vary each year. 

“We tend to add some due to demand and/or what interest teachers have in staying after school,” Fry said. “One of our PE teachers, she loves volleyball—she played in college—so she’s been asking and so we put out a survey, and got a bunch of kids interested, and so we started volleyball.”

Fourth-grade teacher Scott Candelaria started the chess club because he had fond memories of being in a chess club when he was younger.

“It’s just a place where they can come and have fun, and learn some skills, and beat me,” he said. “They have a great time, so I love it. It’s a lot of fun.”

Students have a fun time playing chess with their friends after school, but they are also learning life skills such as problem solving, critical thinking and teamwork.

“There’s the mental side to chess, but really, when you’re working with kindergarten/first grade, they understand some of it but it’s more just, how do you interact with each other,” Candelaria said. “One of the biggest things in elementary school is just some social skills—playing with each other, being a good sport, understanding that we’re not going to always win.” 

Students love playing with Legos in the robotics club, but they’re actually learning skills to prepare them for life, careers and competitions.

The robotics club is divided into four classes, based on age, with progressively more challenging building projects.

“Younger grade levels are basically playing with Legos, and then by the time they get to the older kids, they’re building robots and programming them,” Fry said.

Fifth-grader Aksel Schafer said he joined the club to gain future job skills.

“I want to be an engineer when I get older so I thought it might be fun to learn robotics,” he said.

Emily Williams, from AMES Academy’s First Lego League, is helping Providence Hall to develop their First Lego League program, which fosters teamwork, problem-solving, creativity, while teaching STEM skills.

Providence Hall parent Daniel Deragon likes that his daughter Elizabeth, a first-grader, gets to play creatively in the Lego Club.

“She likes to build things with other people and play with whatever they built,” he said.

Elizabeth also participates in the chess club. Deragon likes that the school provides so many options for his daughter to spend her afternoons. 

“It’s good to have the school activities, to have that community with other kids that gets them doing something,” he said.

Day of play

Providence Hall Elementary teachers are serious about kids learning through play. In addition to hosting the after school clubs, teachers give up a day of instruction each year on Global School Play Day to allows students to learn through play. This year it was held Feb. 5.

“It’s rare these days that kids have a lot of unstructured play,” Fry said. “There’s science behind the idea of unstructured play. Kids need to be able to be creative and innovative and come up with things on their own.”

At all grade levels, without any instructions or input from teachers, PHES students spent the school day doing whatever they wanted. Many students played board games, played with each other and worked on projects on their own.

Fourth grade teacher Glory Hicks was impressed with the creativity of her students. Her class worked together to form a class community, with small businesses—such as a bracelet shop and a bakery—a mayor and community ID cards.

“They had a bank with money that they made, they had a person who was in charge, like the mayor, and she was charging people taxes,” she said. “They ended up organizing this whole thing and it was really great and super fun.”

She said her students always say Global School Play Day is their favorite day of the year because they don’t have to do any schoolwork but they don’t realize that they’re still learning.

“They made a whole community,” she said. “I could have given that for a project or for a lesson, but I didn’t have to. They did it on their own and it was way more fun for them because they made their own rules.”

Hicks said she wishes there was more time for that kind of playing every day.

“It is really good for them, I think, to come and play for a day,” she said. “Kids don’t play a lot, unfortunately.”

Watching their students engage in free play allowed teachers a chance to step back and gain insights into their students’ social patterns, strengths and weaknesses.

One teacher noticed a students spending a lot of time playing with puzzles.

“This student is great at puzzling—but I had no idea,” she said. “I’ve never seen him super-focused in class, but he was on the puzzle for a long time, and so maybe we need to be doing more puzzles in class.”

Less structure also meant more opportunities for students to solve problems without teacher intervention. 

“One of the students was mad someone moved his desk, and I said, ‘Well, what can you do about that?’” an upper-grade teacher said. “I do try to help them quite a bit with that kind of stuff but today I really said ‘Solve your own problem’ a little bit more than normal.” λ