Innovation Blog

 Learning is Child’s Play: How a Principal Revived A Moribund School

By Shlomo Maital

 

  Ein HaYam, Haifa ISRAEL

This is the story of how Baruch Yaakobi, principal of a moribund elementary school in a working class neighborhood of Haifa, used innovation to make his school an “observation center”, where principals from all over Israel come to learn best-practice.

    Yaakobi’s school is in Ein Hayam, overlooking the Mediterranean on the lower slopes of Mt. Carmel.  The neighborhood is aging and enrollment has dwindled, as young people leave for better-off neighborhoods with better schools.  Yaakobi used innovation to save his school.   According to Esti Ahronovitz, writing in the weekly magazine of Haaretz,  at Ein HaYam, children learn by – playing games.  They “play” literature,  “play” Bible, “play” reading and arithmetic, “play” geography and history.  Each day, Ahronovitz reports, children leave classrooms and enter “game playing arenas”, both inside and outside the school building.  There are nearly no frontal lessons.  The children play in order to learn, develop, enjoy themselves and become better people.  In doing so, they implement Plato’s dictum that children learn not by coercion but by play – a principle development psychologists have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.

    For example:

  • In a small grove at the entrance to the school, Grade One students learn addition and subtraction by collecting pine cones and stones and solving problems in notes attached to trees.
  • Another group plays a memory game, using cards with arithmetic exercises whose solutions are found on a game board painted on the playground.
  • 2nd graders do a treasure hunt, with arithmetic exercises that send kids scurrying from one place to another. 
  • 3rd graders are at the beach, researching the sand.
  • 4th graders are in the gym, playing games with boxes.  Nearby a teacher holds up signs with multiplication problems. Kids who give the right answer get to shoot baskets.
  • 5th graders are in the bomb shelter, converted into a game-production lab (know many countries where children learn in bomb shelters?).  One group prepares a trivia game with questions about Israeli towns and cities, after downloading information from the Internet.  Another group prepares a history game, “feast of the gods”, where pupils dress in white sheets and wear floral wreaths.  And so on….

     Yaakobi says, I did not invent the notion of learning through play.  “A child needs a large variety of play activity in order to develop emotionally, socially and cognitively. Play creates opportunities in which children can solve problems and develop emotional tools to cope with conflicts.  Nowadays, children no longer play at school.  A child who does not play will not develop properly.”

      I believe Yaakobi’s concept is applicable to adults as well.  I recall bringing each of four children to kindergarten, and looking at the warm inviting ambience, with Play-Do, plasteline,  crayons, finger paints and other toys, I secretly wished I could stay – for the whole day.  Later, I thought about creating Kindergartens for Elders – where high-pressure managers could go to unwind and return to childhood. 

     Ein HaYam and Baruch Yaakobi suggest it just might work.