It’s late on a Friday afternoon, but the 4th and 5th graders chasing each other around the basketball courts at Adams Elementary School here are in no hurry to get home.
They’ve spent the past hour playing a twist on the classic hoop shooting game H-O-R-S-E, using the name of their school, A-D-A-M-S. They’ve done dribbling relays. And they’ve had short practice games, focusing on the sport’s signature “triangle offense.”
After practice, Olivia Collins, a 4th grade teacher who runs the school’s basketball club, congratulated the students—not on their athletic prowess, but on their attitudes.
“I will say excellent job with sportsmanship, because playing a game can be hard,” Collins said. “Some people got frustrated, and rather than getting angry, what did they do? They took a break, and that’s OK.”
There are going to be ups and downs during a basketball game, she said: “It’s sports, it’s competitive. I would rather you take a break and then get right back into it, then get angry” and ruin the game for others.
It’s not the kind of lesson children would likely learn from watching hours of YouTube videos on a cellphone or tablet screen. But it is one that might be increasingly needed as teachers around the country note a rise in elementary schoolers who have difficulty managing their emotions.
More than 8 in 10 public schools say they’re seeing stunted behavioral and socioemotional development in their students, according to May 2024 data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ School Pulse Panel, which surveys a nationally representative group of more than 1,500 schools from every state and the District of Columbia.
The Spokane school district has worked to make sure that Engage IRL—a roughly two-year-old initiative that couples banning cellphones with a dramatic expansion of extracurriculars to give students opportunities to engage in real life and off screens—starts as early as kindergarten, said Stephanie Splater, the executive director of athletics and after-school programs for the 29,000-student district.
“Elementary is important to us, it’s definitely not an afterthought,” Splater said. “We know that we are teaching them such great lifelong habits, and we want them to connect and feel a sense of belonging at their school site” early on.
There are challenges to expanding extracurriculars for younger students
The number of district-sponsored activities jumped nearly eightfold across the district between 2022-23, the school year before Engage IRL began, and this school year, when the program has been in place for more than a year.
The growth has been a bit slower at the elementary level compared to middle and high schools. The number of unique activities—which includes clubs, sports, and one-off events—grew from 188 in the 2022-23 school year to 300 currently, about a 60% increase across the district’s 34 elementary schools.
To be sure, elementary schools tend to struggle less with digital distraction problems than middle and high schools. But that doesn’t mean the youngest students aren’t exposed to devices.
More than half of kids have their own personal tablets before entering kindergarten, and 1 in 4 have their own smartphones by age 8, according to a report released last year from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that conducts research on youth technology use.
Getting new activities into elementary schools takes deliberative work. There are some hurdles to participation for younger kids that are less of an issue with older students.
For instance, parents may not want an elementary-age child walking home later in the afternoon or taking a city bus after an activity ends. (The district has set up activity buses at select elementary schools to help alleviate that problem).
And “sometimes we have to convince people that it’s OK that kindergartners are there after school,” Splater said. “They don’t need a nap.”
Students can learn to use tech for more than ‘doomscrolling’
Though the idea behind Engage IRL is to get kids off digital devices, technology isn’t taboo in these extracurriculars. It may even take center stage.
For instance, Linwood Elementary in the district hosts both Girls Who Code, a club supported by a national nonprofit that aims to close the gender gap in STEM professions, and Code4All, another club affiliated with a nonprofit that bolsters computer science skills.
Students use iPads and other devices in projects such as leading a robot through a cardboard maze.
“I feel like we’re planting seeds for how they could use devices and technology for productivity in the future,” said Kelsy Shatto, a 3rd grade teacher who co-runs the school’s coding clubs. “It’s getting them off the mindless doomscrolling and games and into, ‘how can this work in the real world?’”
Younger students participate in many of the same clubs and sports older ones do, including volleyball, cheerleading, knitting, arts and crafts, and coding. But there are some activities that are specific to this age group.
For instance, one elementary school hosts an informal “stay and play” club, where students can compete in board games or just hang out on the playground after school.
Other districts should consider creating such loosely structured clubs in the future, suggested Faith Rogow, an independent media literacy scholar and author of Media Literacy for Young Children: Teaching Beyond the Screen Time Debates.
“I think it’s a great idea to offer kids lots of opportunities for lots of activities,” Rogow said. “At the same time, especially for littles, we know that often what they’re lacking the most is just opportunity for free play, where they get to make the rules, do what they want.”
That kind of free-form play teaches students to negotiate with their peers and figure out how to make a game fair to everyone, Rogow said. “After-school activities, for a whole variety of reasons, often are very structured,” she added.
Teachers say they enjoy seeing students get off their devices and play
To Collins, the 4th grade teacher at Adams, the extracurricular push feels like a much-needed balm for students dealing with tech overload, which was exacerbated by pandemic-era remote learning.
“I had kids coming back from COVID, and they had never played team sports before because they couldn’t” due to social distancing, Collins said. “They didn’t know how to work together.”
Collins has far more than the basketball club on her plate. At various times, she has worked with cheerleaders, supervised the Multicultural Club and Girls Who Code, and coached Minecraft competitions, and more—a tall order given that she’s a full-time teacher and mom to two kids under 10.
Why take on so much? “I do it for the money!” said Collins with a joking smile. (Teachers receive a $28 an hour stipend for leading an extracurricular activity but aren’t paid for the time they spend planning activities for clubs or sports teams.)
“Honestly,” she added, “it’s about the opportunity. If we don’t do this, kids aren’t going to get” these experiences.
What’s more, leading clubs gives her a chance to become “Coach Collins,” who her students say has a different energy and feel than Ms. Collins, their 4th grade teacher.
Collins remembers growing up in the 1990s and running around with kids in her neighborhood until it got dark. She’s hoping her work in extracurriculars helps her students experience a piece of what she did as a child.
With more activities filling their time, children today can almost get a taste of the era of being told to “play outside, when the lights come on, go home,” she said, as opposed to “technology ... all the time.”
