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To promote more play, hands-on learning, and that students help each other in the garden of childhood improves academic results , self-control and attention regulation, finds a new research by University of British Columbia (UBC), in Canada.

The study, published in the journal “PLoS One”, found that this approach of the curriculum for kindergarten also increased the joy of the children in the learning and enjoyment of teaching by teachers, and reduced the bullying, the ostracism, peer-to-peer and the exhaustion of the teachers.

“Before children have the ability to sit for long periods of time absorbing information the traditional way in which it is presented at school through conferences, should be allowed to keep them active and encourage them to learn by doing,” says dr. Adele Diamond, professor, Department of Psychiatry, UBC and Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. “In fact, people of all ages, learn best by doing that telling them”.

through a randomized controlled trial , Diamond and his colleagues tested the effectiveness of a curriculum called “Tools of the mind”, presented to kindergarten teachers willing to participate, and 351 children with diverse socio-economic backgrounds in 18 public schools in the school districts of Vancouver and Surrey.

The importance of dramatic play social

The plan was developed in 1993 by the american researchers Elena Bodrova and Deborah Leong.

Its main principle is that the social-emotional development and the enhancement of self-control are just as important as the teaching skills and academic content.

The program emphasizes the role of dramatic play social in the construction of executive functions, including skills such as self-monitoring and selective attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, reasoning, and planning.

“The skills of executive functioning are necessary for learning, and often are more strongly associated with school readiness than intelligence quotient (IQ),” says Diamond. “This test is the first to show the benefits of a plan of studies , which emphasizes the social game executive functioning in a real world environment”.

previous Studies had shown that the plan produces best results for reading and math and on laboratory tests of executive functions.

The new study of Diamond demonstrates for the first time that also dramatically improves the writing (surpassing the top level in the rating scale provincial), improving the executive functions in the real world and has a series of social benefits and emotional that were not previously documented.

teachers reported more behavior help and a greater sense of community in the classes of Tools. Cliques developed in the majority of the control classes, but few classes of Tools.

At the end of the school year, teachers reported that they still felt encouraged and enthusiastic about teaching, while the masters of control they were exhausted .

“I liked to see the enormous progress that my students have achieved in reading and writing. I had never had so many students writing two or three sentences at the end of the garden of childhood,” says Susan Kochan, teacher of “Tools” in Vancouver. “I also enjoyed seeing the students get excited about both to come to school and learn. I loved all of the activities that we did so much that many students did not want to miss to the school, even if they were sick”.

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