Discussion about FE-methods for the plate model delve around the role of the Kirchhoff constraints and how to prevent shear-locking in the thin plate limit. Restricting to the classical potential energy functional for the Reissner-Mindlin plate and the computationally convenient equal order approximations to displacement and rotations, either elementwise reduction or enrichment in approximations are the usual choices. The improvements and developments to the well-known mixed/linked interpolation methods have added to understanding and brought many variants, in particularly, to the Reissner-Mindlin model. Although, e.g., the DKT element for the Kirchhoff model is not too complicated, a conceptually simpler approach would be welcome, e.g., for the teaching purposes. A straightforward FE-method for the Kirchhoff model can be based on two modifications on the classical locking formulation. First, an elementwise polynomial displacement enrichment is used to avoid locking. Second, the shear contribution of the classical potential energy functional for the Reissner-Mindlin model is considered as a penalty term to enforce continuity of displacement in the weak sense. Enrichment is just the span of monomials of higher order than those in the displacement approximation. For stability, enrichment is restricted to vanish at the nodes. Finally, elimination of the additional unknowns gives an accurate and non-locking Kirchhoff plate element in terms of the displacement and rotation components at the nodes.