Recess Essay

1496 Words6 Pages
Ashley Tran Ms. Long ENGL 1101 17 September 2010 The Outdoor Classroom Everyday kids all over America used to play the games such as “Red Rover,” “Cat Mouse,” and many sports on the playground. Everyone gets a chance to relax and socialize. Today, that is not that case anymore. Recess has replaced with more time in the classroom to be more productive because of the new reform called No Child Left Behind, mandating that the schools have higher learning standards to improve the grades of their students. The article, “Recess Makes for Better Students,” tries to exemplify the effects of recess on elementary students by explaining how Romina M. Barros examined the effects of recess on children through her research and found that recess is essential to a child’s behavior and academics. “Recess Makes For Better Students” also mentions how another specialist, Dr. Jane Ripperger-Suhler, explains how recess is very important to a child’s mental and social development. On the other hand, the cartoon the author illustrated has two young children, one boy and one girl. The girl mentions, “I want to be a lawyer – they still get recess,” so they are probably talking about their future, while sitting on a swing set. Amanda Gardner, the author of “Recess Makes for Better Students,” and Matt Anderson, a cartoonist, both refute that recess is an essential part of a child’s life using different methods to convey their position of the argument. Amanda Gardner uses many facts to prove that recess is more than just leisure time. It allows children to develop the crucial skills that cannot be taught in a classroom. These skills help children become better student, hence the title of the article. She mentions how the No Child Left Behind Act or NCBL brought up the recess issue because its aim was to have “higher standards for students starting at younger ages to have improved test
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