A broadside is one sheet, printed both sides, made to be carried into a room and handed to someone. This one compresses the Recess and Play Why Sheet: recess is regulation, not a privilege, and withholding it takes movement from the child who has just shown you they need it.
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Side A of B
Recess and Play
Recess is regulation. It is how a bodymind resets, and it is what makes the next hour possible. It is not a privilege, not a reward, and not a bargaining chip — and the child who has just lost it is almost always the child who most needed it.
Recess is not earned by
being easy to teach.
not for behaviour · not for unfinished work · not ever
The professional position names both doors it is usually taken through. The American Academy of Pediatrics holds that recess should not be withheld for punitive or academic reasons. Not for behaviour. Not for unfinished work.
In controlled experiments, children’s attention to school tasks decreased the longer they were deprived of a break, and they were significantly more attentive after recess than before. Break time is not time away from the work. It is what the work runs on.
Remove the reset, get a worse afternoon, then cite the worse afternoon as proof the child cannot be trusted with the reset. The plan produces the behaviour it then measures — and the child pays twice.
“Children should not have to earn recess, and they should not miss recess as a punishment.”
Laura Hanby Hudgens · Recess Is Not a Privilege · HuffPost · 2015- a child who cannot get through the afternoon without moving is not disqualified from moving
- unfinished work is information about the task, the support or the pace — not a debt paid in break time
- “they can finish it at break” removes the one thing that makes the next hour possible
- solitary, repetitive and parallel play are play; a child at the edge of the yard is still at recess
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Side B of B
- Ask for it in writing that recess is never withheld. Not “rarely”. A policy with an exception is a policy that will be used.
- Ask what the removal is meant to achieve, and how anyone would know it worked. It is usually measured by whether the adult felt it was fair.
- Ask for unfinished work to be handled another way. Work not finished is information about the task, the support or the pace — not a debt paid in break time.
- Ask what happens instead when a child is dysregulated. If the answer is sitting quietly under supervision, that is the same intervention with a kinder name.
- Ask for the numbers — minutes, for which children, how often withheld. The disparity does not appear until somebody counts.
Withheld recess is a regulation issue. Cut recess is a justice issue, and it shows up in the numbers wherever anyone has looked.
- In Seattle Public Schools, 51% of Black elementary students attended a low-recess school, against 13% of white students.
- Most white kindergarteners in that district got at least 45 minutes a day.
- Nationally, Black students and students from low-income families are more likely to be given no recess or minimal recess.
- It can be won back. Seattle educators made recess a bargaining demand and took it to the brink of a strike. In September 2015 the district agreed to a minimum of 30 minutes in every elementary school.
- it is not a claim that nothing changes after an incident
- it is not a claim that recess fixes everything
- it is not an attack on teachers, who did not write the timetable
- it is a refusal to take regulation from a dysregulated child
- it is a demand that solitary, repetitive and parallel play count as play
- it is about the bulk cuts too, not only the withheld ten minutes
“Play is not a reward or break from doing learning, play IS learning.”
Abe Moore · A Playground Should Have A Pulse · Human Restoration Projectfree to print, copy, change and share — no permission needed
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