Balancing Digital and Analog Activities in Afterschool Programs with Young Children
By Claire Quimby
Rockman et al Cooperative (REA) is excited to be partnering with Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) on a multiyear project funded by a Ready to Learn grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Skillsvilleᵀᴹ is a suite of media resources for young children that promote executive function skills and self-regulation strategies and aim to build children’s awareness and excitement around a wide variety of careers. This blog post is part of a series on what we have learned from our recent pilot study of the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ curriculum in afterschool programs.
From 8 am to 3 pm, Cheryl¹ teaches first grade at a midsize elementary in an under-resourced community in Louisiana. When the school bell rings, she doesn’t turn to grading papers or preparing for the next day’s lessons. She drives a short distance to a second job where she works as an afterschool program educator. Like Cheryl, the students who attend that afterschool program have already had a full day before they arrive. Cheryl’s job is to fill the afterschool hours with activities that are engaging and educational while also fitting in homework and snacks.
Twin Cities Public Television created the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ Children’s Program for afterschool programs like Cheryl’s, with a mixture of digital and analog activities that center on the three Skillsvilleᵀᴹ curricular pillars: executive function skills, self-regulation strategies, and career awareness. The curriculum includes eBooks, digital games, videos, and paper-based activities. Many of the digital activities are designed for children using 1:1 technology (tablets), but they can also be done as whole-group activities. One of our evaluation goals when piloting the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ curriculum was to understand how well these activities worked for children and educators in afterschool settings. Were the activities engaging? Would they hold children’s attention long enough to support the learning goals in an informal education environment, where children have more freedom to choose activities?
Cheryl and other educators who piloted the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ afterschool curriculum conveyed the clear message that so much depends on the energy and mindset of the children as they transition from their busy school day. Whether they are exhausted or wound up, students are looking for a change from what they’ve been doing all day, and that can have a strong influence on which activities hold their interest. One educator talked about how children who have just wrapped up six hours of school don’t want to sit and listen to an adult present a traditional lesson. Even digital games — usually very popular with children — might not hold their attention at the end of a long school day. Something that did seem to hold their attention, however, were the hands-on activities incorporated into the curriculum:
A lot of the ones that were hands-on — they liked that…where they actually had pieces to manipulate. Or when they designed the grocery store, they had such a good time doing that… We provided them with like the little shopping carts and the grocery shelves, but they got to put them where they wanted, and they got to put on the shelves what they wanted. It’s after school. They’re tired. I’m tired. So if the activities involved them manipulating something or constructing something, then they did really well.
Other educators reported a similar experience. Of all the activities in the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ curriculum, the ones where children could manipulate real physical objects and think creatively were the most successful — activities like “Design Your Own Grocery Store” described in the quote above, or another activity where children take on the role of a hotel desk clerk by assigning guests to appropriate rooms based on their needs. Some of the educators suggested that this may be due to the amount of screentime that children get during their regular school days before coming to the afterschool program:
The things that they are actually able to do hands-on and not on a computer — The kids love that. I think it’s because we’re almost like 100% technology here, so they do so much on their computers.
Two individuals also talked about their groups having difficulty focusing on the short videos included in the curriculum. These videos include brief segments that introduce a self-regulation strategy (e.g., yoga poses, counting exercises) and invite children to try them out, and short storybooks where a narrator reads along with still pictures. We don’t know whether children’s low interest in the videos was due to screentime burnout or just shortened attention spans, but several educators had more success when they actively facilitated the video content, pausing it to talk with children about the story and ask questions. This extra effort made the content more engaging and helped reinforce the educational content as well. One educator felt that providing this scaffolding to the videos really helped her students understand the self-regulation strategies and the executive function skills that they support:
It helps them to kind of deal with not just each other but just difficult situations or just stressful situations or just them being unhappy. You know, instead of telling them to stop, focus, or calm down, you treat it like you would in [Skillsville]. Take a pause, and then they could relate to the characters…and think about your skills that you can use to achieve the things.
Insights like these underline the importance of paying attention to the social context of learning. Afterschool programs that offer a variety of activity types and flexibility for educators to choose what will work best for their students on any given day will likely be more successful at engaging learners and have greater uptake by educators. Best of all, they have the potential to make the last part of the day feel like a welcome break, rather than a final hurdle to overcome.
The contents of this program were developed under the Ready to Learn grant from the U.S. Department of Education (PR S295A200002) awarded to Twin Cities PBS. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.
To learn more about Rockman et al Cooperative visit: rockman.com.
¹ All names are pseudonyms.
