One School's Experiment with Outdoor Play

It's 10:45 a.m. and a gaggle of five- and six-year-olds are carrying a heavy fallen tree trunk across the northern slope of Fort Greene Park. In another corner, classmates are making a tower out of stones while three other friends play house, marking out rooms with their arms. There is chatter about asteroid-shaped rocks, seeds and ships, and stinky gingko berries.

Here is a video of a public school experiment playing out in Brooklyn. While an estimated 40 percent of schools in the United States are cutting back on recess, John Allgood and Valerie Lockhart, two kindergarten teachers at the Academy of Arts and Letters in Fort Greene, are taking it in the opposite direction.

In addition to a daily recess, they bring their 25 students to play in a nearby park for up to four hours every Wednesday, during all seasons of the year. 

"We go out in drizzle, light rain, cold weather and snow," says Allgood. To ensure that all children could fully and comfortably participate, they received a grant and collected donations from parents to purchase rain boots and gloves. 

On a recent rainy Wednesday, the kids made mud pies and sold them in their mud restaurant. 

"Unstructured outside play comes so naturally to kids," says Lockhart. "There is no direction, there are no prompts. They pick things up and they feel it and they examine it...and they also have to problem-solve because they’re working with others. So much is happening." 

The Department of Education's wellness policy has no recess requirement. Rather, it encourages principals of elementary school students to offer, in all kinds of weather, "at least 20 minutes a day of supervised recess, preferably outdoors, during which time staff encourage moderate to vigorous physical activity and provide appropriate space and equipment." 

Advocacy groups have complained that recess and physical education are ignored at many city schools, particularly during the winter months.