Effectively moving, Pudong New Area explores making young children move scientifically, ensuring the quality and quantity of "2-hour outdoor activities". Teacher | Exercise | Children

How do children play with four or five specially made white buckets placed on the playground? At Donggang Kindergarten in Pudong New Area, teachers conducted a 10 day exercise "experiment": from the first day, rolling, crawling, and pushing each other, to the 10th day, they tried to put the balance beam on the highest white bucket, cross the "high-altitude single plank bridge" with various movements, and even children connected all the white buckets together and played "tricks" through the tunnel... The teachers exclaimed that at this age, they are truly born athletes! As long as they are given enough time and space, they can fully demonstrate their nature and unconsciously cultivate their abilities from exploration and manipulation to adaptation and familiarity, from proficient control to design and creation during the process of exercise.

On June 15th, kindergarten principals from various districts in the city gathered together to express their opinions at the on-site meeting of "Shanghai Action to Build High Quality Kindergartens in an All Around Way - Exploration and Practice of Improving the Quality of Preschool Sports". They jointly discussed how to ensure the quality of "2-hour outdoor activities", reduce the number of overweight and myopic babies, and improve children's exercise ability, making them healthier and more sunny.

In this regard, the "host" Pudong New Area has its own exploration.

Sample: Time duration+frequency to ensure both quality and quantity

In 1989, the Ministry of Education's "Kindergarten Work Regulations" required that outdoor activities should not be less than 2 hours per day and physical activities should not be less than 1 hour. By 2022, the "Guidelines for Quality Evaluation of Kindergarten Care Education" had been issued, once again emphasizing the time for outdoor and physical activities.

2 hours of outdoor activities, including 1 hour of exercise. There are corresponding childcare education arrangements for young children in the kindergarten every day. How to ensure the duration of outdoor activities is a new test question for the kindergarten.

"A researcher once discovered that one hour is often consumed by various reasons. For example, starting from the classroom, gathering a team, going down the stairs, and then gathering children on the playground to explain related matters... Perhaps 10 minutes have passed, and time quietly passes in these unintentional moments." The practice in daily teaching has led Ni Chunyu, the principal of Donggang Kindergarten, to think, "How can teachers value and cherish children's exercise time from the inside out? We believe that as long as teachers are guided to discover the changes that the duration and frequency bring to children, they can help teachers actively ensure 'enough duration'." Starting from the "45 minute regional independent activity," she led the teachers to study the duration. "The significance of frequency in the learning and development of young children.

So, the kindergarten increased the outdoor exercise time for young children to one hour and twenty minutes a day, with an extra ten minutes in the morning. Ten minutes before the start of the exercise, the children created their own favorite sports scenes through cooperative transportation and independent placement. A fun and challenging amusement park has emerged.

"The relatively sufficient duration determines the 'complexity', 'precision', and 'challenge' of children's games. If conditions permit, giving an extra 10 minutes may lead to a different kind of appearance." Ni Chunyu said, "Therefore, we call on every teacher to protect the daily exercise duration of children, and children will present us with infinite excitement in the sufficient duration.".

On the basis of ensuring time, we also need to ensure quality.

So, there were frequency related "white bucket" experiments in kindergartens. In the past, kindergartens would rotate the outdoor sports area once a day, allowing children to try different sports every day. However, teachers found that this frequency of exercise caused confusion for children's exploration: when they come back to play this sport next week, many children need to familiarize themselves with it from the beginning, and the level of exploration in sports is somewhat stagnant.

In the past two years, with the efforts of teachers, kindergartens have changed the previous practice of rotating outdoor sports areas once a day. Instead, a class has been in the same area for 1-2 consecutive weeks, and sometimes even flexibly extended the frequency of exercise according to age characteristics and class needs. After two weeks of exploration, the children have come up with various "tricks". Although there are many repetitive behaviors every day, behind them is the consolidation and practice of children from the inside out. This is an essential process that satisfies children's imagination and helps them acquire skills.

"By providing children with sufficient time and frequency for independent outdoor activities, we can see that children are becoming more and more athletic and self challenging. This changes the teacher's perspective on children, reconstructs the teacher-child relationship, and also contributes to the professional development of the teacher team," said Ni Chunyu.

Promotion and exploration: making young children move scientifically and effectively

Move the classroom outdoors. Teachers modify lesson plans to allow children to fully engage with the environment and complete the process of exploration, thinking, and feeling in the natural environment for those knowledge that was originally learned indoors. Slowly, the teachers found that children's activity processes were more open, their activity experiences were more diverse, and their activity experiences were also richer.

Last year, Pudong New Area piloted the implementation of "monitoring of outdoor activities for young children in kindergartens" in 93 kindergartens of two preschool education groups. Through information technology methods such as exercise bracelets, the duration and trajectory of 2-hour outdoor activities for young children were effectively monitored and analyzed. Research was conducted on how to improve the quality and effectiveness of outdoor activities through curriculum design, project arrangement, and other aspects.

At present, 328 public kindergartens in Pudong orderly carry out outdoor 2-hour activities, with over 90% of kindergartens focusing on outdoor activities as their teaching and research focus, and over 80% of kindergartens accumulating experience in implementing outdoor activities on rainy days. 100% of young children indicate that they enjoy outdoor activities.

In addition, since 2020, there have been nearly 50 urban-level projects involving outdoor 2-hour activities in Pudong New Area, of which 24 urban-level projects focus on children's sports, such: huagao Kindergarten's "Empirical Research on Moderate Delivery of Children's Outdoor Dispersed Sports Materials", Dongyuan Kindergarten's "Strategic Research on Improving Children's Outdoor Autonomous Sports Experience", Donggang Kindergarten's "Practical Research on Overweight Children's Sports Intervention by Using Digital Information Technology" and other topics have all been systematically studied to sort out the replicable and popularized practical experience of children's sports, especially children's outdoor sports.

In 2023, the Teaching and Research Guidance Department of Pudong Education Development Research Institute conducted a comprehensive survey on the quality of childcare and education with the theme of "2-hour outdoor activities in kindergartens" covering the entire region. During the one month survey, various methods such as on-site observation, teacher questionnaires, and child interviews were used to comprehensively understand the implementation status of outdoor 2-hour activities in kindergartens at all levels and types, identify and analyze problems, and form subsequent teaching and research themes based on the problems, promoting high-quality and sustainable development of outdoor 2-hour activities in kindergartens throughout the region.

"The myopia monitoring data in the past three years shows that the overall myopia rate of children and adolescents in Pudong has been decreasing year by year. Due to various factors, the key to myopia prevention and control has been moved to the preschool stage. Allowing children to bask in sunlight outdoors and broaden their horizons is the most effective method for myopia prevention and control. The reduction of 'little glasses' and' little chubby people 'is inseparable from the kindergarten's insistence on carrying out outdoor activities." Chen Bin, Deputy Director of the Education Bureau of Pudong New Area, said that on the basis of achieving the "quantity" of outdoor activities for 2 hours, we should continue to improve the "quality" of 2-hour activities, not only allowing children to move outdoors, but also making them move scientifically and effectively.