"Children Do Not Like Being Incompetent Any More Than They Like Being Ignorant"

As a child, there were certain adults who I instantly liked, whereas there were others for whom I would take an immediate dislike. It generally came down to how they treated me. If they looked me in the eye, spoke in their normal voice, laughed at my jokes, not my mistakes, and refrained from such intrusive things as patting me on the head, pinching my cheeks, or picking me up without my consent, then they were one of the "good guys."

Most adults in mixed-age social settings would just ignore me, which was fine, because I would likewise ignore them, preferring the company of my fellow children, but there were always some who would loom at me, smiling too widely, speaking too loudly, sometimes even descending into a kind of baby talk. They might have been well-intended, but I resented their insipid, prying questions, questions they would never dare ask an adult they didn't know: "What are you going to be when you grow up?" or "Are you a good boy for your teacher?" They would look around at the other adults as I obediently replied beaming condescendingly as if they were a confederacy of superior beings deigning to include the cute, precious, innocent child for a moment.

To this day, there are few things more certain to set this early childhood educator's teeth on edge than adults who condescend to children. As a boy, the irritation was with their obvious phoniness and their clear, insulting assumption that I was some kind of baby. Now, however, I understand that it is even worse. These are adults, and there are more of them now than ever, who see children not as an individual humans, but rather as an idea, a stereotype. They don't see actual people, but rather their concept of children as incomplete adults -- simple, unformed, incompetent, and so so so charmingly innocent. It's okay to command or control them, to even lie to them, just so long as they can convince themselves that it's "for their own good."

Many of these people are in charge of schools and curriculum. Many are teachers. There are even parents who start off with this attitude only to spend the next couple decades mourning the loss of their vision of what a child is as their own child proves to be an actual human being. These are the parents who think they are doing their child a service by protecting them from learning about sex, gender, or racism because they are too tender and dear to be exposed to such things.

John Holt writes, "It is condescending when we respond to qualities that enable us to feel superior to the child. It is sentimental when we respond to qualities that do not exist in the child but only in some vision or theory that we have about children . . . Children do not like being incompetent any more than they like being ignorant. They want to learn to do, and do well, the things they see being done by bigger people around them. This is why they soon find school such a disappointment; they so seldom get a chance to learn anything important or do anything real. But many of the defenders of childhood, in or out of school, seem to have this vested interest in the children's incompetence, which they often call 'letting the child be a child.'"

We are born into the shock of light, cold, and sound, then must spend our first days learning to live with it. From the moment we come into this world, we are fully aware that there is pain, fear, and that life is often unfair. We are never innocent in this life: the idea of childhood innocence is really just adults romanticizing ignorance. Our children do not need to be protected from the hard lessons of life, even if that were possible. They do not benefit from our theories about what children are and are not. They are here on this earth, like all of us, to learn what it means to be alive and our responsibility as important adults in their lives is to be fellow travelers, consoling them when the lessons are hard, helping them when the tasks are difficult, but most of all loving them as the capable, competent humans they are.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

They are a Head Taller Than Themselves

I was at Archie McPhee's in Seattle, the best store in the world, when I suddenly found an impossibly tiny boy at my knees. He said, eyes wide, "You're here."

It took me a moment, but I finally recognized him as one of my two-year old students. Seeing him out of context had thrown me a bit. Here, out in the world, he stuck me as so much younger than he did at school, not just smaller, but less mature, less assured. At school, he was a leader amongst his peers, always the first to try new things, bold, even a bit cocky, but here was, well, wee in every way.

This has happened to me before -- in parks, restaurants, and on the street -- running into children who seem physically, intellectually, socially, and emotionally younger than they do at school. 

Psychologist Lev Vygotsky wrote, "In play a child always behaves beyond their average age, above their daily behavior; in play it is as though they were a head taller than themself."

This is what happens when we get to know children in an environment where they have permission to play. 

When we play, we are our emergent selves. When we play we are in a state of becoming, of learning, of leaving old ideas behind, of toppling the status quo. When we play, we are making way for the new ideas, for the new status quo we are discovering, exploring, and creating through our self-selected course of study.

Parents often remark that their children are so much better "behaved" at school, more "cooperative," and more "mature." That's because at our school, they are a head taller than themselves. 

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Learning to Be Alone With Your Thoughts and Reveries

I spent most of my free time outdoors as a boy. I'd like to say that's where I chose to be, and I certainly have a lot of fond memories of playing outdoors, but it's also where Mom wanted us kids to be. She might let us watch a single TV program, but then we were shooed outside so that our eyes wouldn't "turn square." Any running or rowdiness was to be taken outside. For our own good, and her own, we were turned outdoors as long as there was still light in the sky.

Usually, we didn't object, especially since outside was where the other kids were, but I also have memories of long afternoons alone in my room. I could spend hours building a fort with my blocks, then populating it with toy soldiers, good guys and bad guys. When it was finally time for the shooting to begin, I would track the path of each individual bullet from the barrel of the gun to its target which I would knock over, dead or wounded, sometimes causing them to fall dramatically from the top of a tower. In the end, the entire fort would be destroyed in slow motion, one block at a time.

Sometimes I would set up one of our family board games -- like Monopoly -- then play all the pawns as my own.

My stuffed animals had personalities, social relationships, even entire communities, complete with families, friendships and rivalries.

As I got a little older I would sort, order, and rank my baseball cards based on statistics or the poses of the pictured athletes.

And then there was always drawing, hours and hours of drawing with pencils and pens, often detailed war scenes. Echoing my block play, I would take the time to track the path of each bullet with dotted lines, making sure every Nazi got what was coming to him. (I wasn't war obsessed, but we lived near Ft. Jackson and it played a role in my imaginary life.) One of these pictures was even selected to be hung at the South Carolina State Fair.

I'm fully capable of being a social and active person, but I'm also inclined to lose myself in my thoughts and reveries. In fact, writing this blog each morning is part of that. I get up at 5 a.m. for the quiet, for the solitude, to recapture that feeling I had as a boy sorting his bottle cap collection. It's not about limiting distractions because the early morning is full of them -- the mocking bird songs, the rumble of garbage trucks, the slow, sure rising of the sun -- but maybe it is a little bit about curating them. 

I love the unmitigated rambling of my thoughts, the stewing over things, the wondering and wishing. Few things delight me more than to imagine how I would distribute a financial windfall. My wife and I call it "spending Yugoslavian dollars."

You know that I'm fully comfortable with you when I start surfacing my internal dialog in your presence. When I first started doing this with my wife she would say, "Stop obsessing!" as if my mind were plaguing me, but she now understands that I take great and (usually) private joy in letting my mind gallop to no purpose other than because it is a nice way to pass the time.

I know a lot of people who wish they could turn their minds off, who want to stop obsessing. Often they attempt to do this with distraction: watch a program, go to a museum, exercise, socialize, anything to avoid being alone with their thoughts and reveries. And, of course, smartphones have become the go-to distraction. 

A few days ago, we attended a 40th anniversary screening of the Academy Award winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. The director, Robert Epstein, is a friend and neighbor and the theater was full of fellow friends and neighbors. We greeted one another with hugs and handshakes, but then most settled into their seats and turned on their private screens to await the opening credits. I've stopped carrying my phone with me when I go out, so I found myself alone in a crowd. I was instantly transported to being a boy in church during a dull sermon when I would imagine the heroism I would display should we suddenly be rocked by an earthquake, or the adventure we would have if the entire building revealed itself to be a space ship sent to carry us all off to another planet, or simply the satisfaction I would experience from calculating the number of people in the pews, hymnals in the racks, or panes of stained glass in the windows.

This is a skill I learned as a boy, this comfort with, and even craving for, being alone with my thoughts and reveries. I know I'm not the only one worried about what we are losing in this era of ubiquitous screens. It really is possible to never be alone with yourself. Maybe this is a skill that can be acquired as an adult, but it's not the same thing as meditation which seeks to quiet the "chattering monkeys." I'm talking about listening to those monkeys, taking pleasure in their voices, and letting them carry me where they will, or where I will. 

Maybe it's because I learned to enjoy my quiet time as a boy that it feels to me that this is the only time to learn it, but I can say that when I look back over the arc of my life, I've spent many of my most enjoyable hours alone amongst my thoughts and reveries. Maybe I've just made friends with my obsessiveness. I don't know. But I do know that many adults, and increasingly many children, have no idea what to do with their quiet time. Ready access to screens as a boy would have likely meant that I would not have learned it at all. Maybe I wouldn't even know enough to miss it.

This is not just about smartphones, however. Most young children today are spending the bulk of their waking hours in preschools and day cares, always amidst a crowd, always stimulated and distracted, always on schedule, never alone in their room, or any room. Indeed, we've come to a point where we believe it's a danger to leave a child unsupervised in a room. When do they get to track the path of individual bullets or make an entire world from stuffies? 

Yet, at the same time, we are facing a national crisis of loneliness. I can't help but think they are connected.

Maybe one of the antidotes to loneliness is learning how to be alone with our thoughts and reveries, to know how to embrace the monkeys. We focus on the smartphones, but maybe they aren't the cause, but rather a symptom.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

That is Respect

The four-year-old boy was in full on tantrum. He had lost his temper with another child, punching him in the neck, then picked up a wooden block as if to throw it at him. I grabbed his wrist, then with the other hand took the block from his grasp. He fought against me, trying to get away, yelling, crying, outraged. There were other children nearby, not to mention furniture and other objects on which he could potentially hurt himself. I took hold of his other arm, holding both wrists firmly.

He was fighting against me as I gently pulled him away from the crowd, toward a corner of the room where I sat on a bench, drawing him into me, my arms and legs encircling him. He continued to lash about. My arm would show a bruise for a few days. 

I said, "I don't like it when you hit me." 

I said, "My job is to keep people safe and when you hit people it's not safe." 

I said, "I can't let you hurt people."

This is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of our job: to keep the children safe. And that is what I was doing.

He called me "stupid." He spit. He continued to fight against my arms. I didn't take any of it personally. I said, "I can't let you go until I know you won't hit other people."

To his credit, he was honest, "I will hit them."

"Then I'll hold you," I said, "until you're ready to not hit them.

He continued to wrestle against me, but I could feel in my arms and in my chest that his full-body tension was beginning to ebb, so I loosened my grip slightly. He began to talk more coherently as he threw his body against mine, explaining himself, telling me what had happened. I said, "That would make me mad too."

Before long, I was holding my arms in a loose circle, his body between my legs. If he had wanted to, he could have easily ducked away, but instead he rolled around in my arms, still crying, still telling me what he wanted to tell me. 

I asked, "If I let you go will you hurt other people?" He said, "Yes," so we stayed there.

When another child came up to ask me a question, his body tensed once more as he shouted, "I need Teacher Tom now! You can have him later!"

Soon he was just leaning up against me, between my legs, my arms around his shoulders, the last of spasms of whimpering faded. I wasn't holding him at all any more. He said, "I'm ready for you to let me go now. I won't hurt anybody."

There are a lot of adult who would tell me I did it all wrong, that what this boy needed was to be taught a little respect.

All too often, adult people talking about young children use the word "respect" or "disrespect" when what they mean is "obey" or "disobey." There are even those who assert, against all evidence, that parents teach respect through punishment, even through hitting children in the barbaric practice of spanking. What they are teaching is fear. What they are teaching is that the powerful have the right to abuse and bully those over whom they have power so long as they mitigate it with the caveat, "for their own good."

I've known far too many adults who claim to respect children, but who wield their physical, intellectual, social, and cultural power over them like a cudgel.

"I'm the adult!" they insist, as if that's a valid argument. 

None of this has anything to do with respect. Indeed, exerting power over another person is the height of disrespect. 

Becoming a play-based educator begins and ends with respecting young children and that is where it began for me with this boy.

Respect means that we know that this person before us, no matter how small, is a fully formed human being. Indeed, respect for young children, or anyone for that matter, is the opposite of having the right of power over others: respect demands that we assume a slew of obligations and responsibilities toward them. It's not a tit-for-tat transaction. They owe us no respect in return. But rather, if we are to be respected by our children, we must earn it. And the only way to earn respect from our children is by first respecting them. 

There is no love without respect. As bell hooks writes in her book All About Love, "Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust" (italics are mine). Any relationship that does not include respect is not one of love, but rather, one of power.

And power corrupts, a cliché that is borne out time and again through research.

"One of the effects of power," writes Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind, "is that it makes you see others in a negative light. If you're powerful you're more likely to think most people are lazy and unreliable. That they need to be supervised and monitored, managed and regulated, censored and told what to do." Sounds a lot like how our schools operate, doesn't it? It might even corrupt us so much that we feel that we have the right to hit them . . . for their own good.

Play-based education only works when the adults respect the children. It means knowing that their needs, desires, and opinions stand on an equal footing with our own. It doesn't mean that we let them do whatever they want. Those obligations and responsibilities require us to, at minimum, keep them and others safe. We say, "I can't let you do that," then proceed to not let them do it, not because we say so, not because we are the adult, but because we are honoring our responsibility to keep them safe. 

There are likewise times when our responsibilities require us to keep them on schedule, maintain a certain level of hygiene, or otherwise do things they don't want to do, but that doesn't mean we must command them in the fashion of "my way or the highway." It means that we are obliged to explain ourselves, to be transparent about our responsibilities, and to sympathize with their feelings about it.

We say, "I know you don't want to." 

We say, "I don't want to either." 

We say, "I can't let you." 

If it's not negotiable, we don't negotiate. 

And sometimes that means that we take their hands or pick them up and carry them, crying, even yelling. When this happens, no one is showing anyone disrespect: one person is fulfilling their responsibility, while the other is raging at the fates. We might even tell them, "I feel the same way."

It's a nuance many adults don't get. They hear tantrums as rebellion and it is rebellion if it's a reaction to an abuse of power. That is, after all, what rebellion always is. When respect is present, however, when love is present, we can see their tears as the most human thing in the world. There is nothing to rebel against. They simply aren't getting what they want, not because the powerful are keeping it from them, but because life is imperfect. And sometimes that makes us cry. When respect is present, the adult is then there, not as a punitive force, but rather as a loving support, a fellow traveler in disappointment. And to keep everyone safe.

Every play-based educator has experienced that moment when a child in tantrum, relaxes into our shoulder, taking comfort from us even as, only moments before, it might have looked to outsiders that they were fighting against us. Only now are we ready to begin to make things right again.

That is respect.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Every Child is Born a Genius

On the short list of history's geniuses, most of us would include Leonardo da Vinci. He is perhaps the most famous polymath to ever live -- a painter, sculptor, architect, scientist, engineer, technologist, and mathematician of the highest order. He is the embodiment of the High Renaissance. Today, he is best known for his painting the Mona Lisa, a masterpiece that to this day defines what a masterpiece is all about. But his other existing works like The Last Supper are every bit as sublime not to mention the volumes of notebooks he left behind detailing everything from helicopters and nautical innovations to adding machines, anatomical studies, and optical discoveries.

I think it's safe to say that most of us would be pretty proud if our kid grew up to be the new da Vinci, right? I mean, he represents the pinnacle of the much ballyhooed STEM (or STEAM) schooling that we hear so much about. Although, to be honest, Leonardo himself never went to school. He was a "studio boy" in an artist's workshop, eventually becoming an apprentice. It's unknown whether he chose that particular career path or if he just fell into it by way of relieving his lower-class single mother of the burden of his upkeep.

All told, the great genius da Vinci produced fewer than 25 paintings, most of which were unfinished and still in his possession upon his death. The Mona Lisa remained one of those unfinished works, even after some 15 years of fiddling with it. Of the works he actually "finished" most only saw the light of day in his lifetime because his patrons threatened to stop funding him. Indeed, he spent much of his life dodging debtors. His notebooks full of innovations, inventions, and discoveries were exactly that, notebooks in which he doodled his ideas, never intended for the public eye. It's likely that he would today have been diagnosed with ADHD, so scattered and varied were his interests and activities.

What a deadbeat! At least if judged by today's productivity standards, da Vinci was a classic failure-to-launch dreamer, full of high falutin ideas, but obviously without the grit or rigor to pull himself up by his own bootstraps or whatever. Just imagine what he could have accomplished had he only been more motivated.

It's a sucker's game, of course, to play 'what if' with history, but what if Leonardo had had the benefits of modern schooling?

I think it's safe to say that he would not have be Leonard da Vinci. Certainly, he might have found a vocation that kept the debtors off his back. Maybe he would have become a painter with his own commercial studio, cranking out above average allegorical motifs and portraits to decorate the hallways and mantles of the wealthy, perhaps even developing a line of budget paintings for more humble households. Or maybe he would have joined the military or become an engineer or an architect or a botanist, all vocations for which he showed an aptitude. But I think it's safe to say that he would not have become the great genius Leonardo. His school masters would have seen to that. He might have been more productive, but it's quite clear that fiddling, perfecting, and doodling were the methods behind his unique and world-changing genius. 

Without that, he would not have been the wonderfully fallible Leonardo da Vinci, but rather just another promising young man who made a decent living.

It's tempting to say, Oh, but that's just Leonardo the genius. He's the exception. Most kids left to their fiddling, perfecting, and doodling would just waste their time on video games. Maybe. It's also possible that our educational system that focuses on productivity and paying the bills as the key measures of success has created mass mediocrity from the raw material of genius. 

What if that other iconic genius Albert Einstein was right: "Every child is born a genius." What if the real trick of education is to not waste it on productivity and paying the bills?

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

This is What We Choose

The closer something is to the core of existence, the harder it is to define. 

One of the reasons we struggle to do consistent research into play, for instance, is that we can't, from research team to research team, seem to agree on what exactly play is . . . Although most of us know it when we see it. Consciousness is so notoriously difficult to define that it's often referred to as "the hard problem." But we know it when we experience it. We struggle to define "life," "art," "learning," and "happiness" even as we have all had those experiences.

Perhaps the most elusive, and most central, of all is this thing called love. Parental love, romantic love, devine love, communal love, self-love, redemptive love, and more, are all entangled in our ideas of what love is all about.

In his classic self-help book, The Road Less Traveled, psychiatrist M. Scott Peck tries out this definition of love: "(T)he will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." There's another impossible to define word -- spirit.

I can honestly say that I've loved every child who has ever some my way. I didn't always like every child, but I always made the choice to love them.

"Love," writes Peck, "is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love." As early childhood educators, as caretakers of young children, as parents, when we embrace the choice to nurture growth in young children, be that spiritual or otherwise, we are choosing love.

Of course, in a world that often views "love" as something instinctual or out of our control, the idea of choosing love may sound like a pipe dream. After all we "fall" in love, right? And falling in love suggests a Bam! Boom! Swoon! type of an experience, but I would argue that that ain't love. It might lead to love, but as bell hooks writes in her book All About Love, "To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients -- care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication." This takes time and it starts with a choice to nurture growth.

I know that some of us are uncomfortable talking about love in a professional context, but ours is a field that touches, relentlessly, upon the core of what it means to be human. It is that place of awe and wonder, yes, but also right there beside it, are the awful truths that we futilely believe we can hide from the ears of youth. Every day, all day, we nurture children as they howl with pain, as they freeze in fear, as they glimpse the abyss. We call upon our commitment to care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and communication as we sit with them through everything. We choose to do this. We choose love.

This often unspoken, even unacknowledged choice we make each day is why the efforts of dilettantes to streamline or standardize or otherwise improve our practice always fail. They can only see the rote. They can only see those things that are simple to define because they stand so far away from the core of what it means to exist. We work in the part of the world in which definitions are elusive, and it's not just love. Teaching itself defies definitions. It's art, play, and learning as well. It's the hard problem. This is what we commit ourselves to when we choose to nurture spiritual growth. It's a commitment to life itself. 

This is how our profession is unlike any other.

The reason that those outside our profession find what we do so confounding is that most other professions are based on love's opposite: power.

"When love rules power disappears. When power rules love disappears." ~Paulo Coelho

There is no commitment to love in relationships based upon power. When power supplaints love, we find rigid schedules, both daily and developmental, in which everyone must constantly worry about "falling behind." Power predominates in places where adults seek to prepare children for some future life rather than allowing them to live the life they are living.

"Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." ~Carl Jung

Love does not dictate; love does not manage; love does not need tricks and tips for manipulating children. Love is about connection. It is about listening. It is about acceptance. It is about this unique and beautiful person. As Mister Rogers wrote, "To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now." That is where child-centered learning begins. Love does not prepare children for life because to love someone is to know that they are already, right here and now, living.

That is what love nurtures. This is what we choose.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Real Learning that Happens Through Play

Critics of play-based learning often express doubts about whether any "meaningful" learning happens through play. Or rather, they don't count it as learning unless we can prove to them that any individual child has experienced the transformation from ignorance to knowledge.

For instance, when I assert that a child playing with our cast-iron water pump is learning about hydraulics, they might press me for evidence of my assertion. I might then explain that they are learning about hydraulics because they are directly experiencing it, seeing it with their eyes and feeling it in their bodies. I might point out that they are engaged in trial and error scientific experiments by digging channels in the sand to direct the water, dams to block it, bridges to go over it. I might invite this critic to listen to how the children use their own words to describe what they are experiencing or planning. 

"Let's make a major overflow!"

"Hey, we made an island!"

"Pump faster!"

Most people then get it, even if it doesn't look like the school they experienced or that they anticipate in their child's future. But there are many who still want to hear it from the child themself. They want me to test them in some way. They want to hear the words "hydraulics" or "water pressure" or "gravity" or "liquid" or whatever a textbook might call it. They want to know that this learning is in the children's conscious minds because, for these critics, the only learning that counts is the stuff we can prove we know that we know. 

This is the entire testing industry in a nutshell: attempting to prove what children are able to hold in their conscious minds. And really, if we're being honest, even then it only counts for these critics as learning if a teacher has intentionally "taught" it to them. All this playing with a cast-iron water pump might be educational, but unless the child can somehow articulate the learning in an approved manner, it ain't real learning.

Here's the thing: people who study learning have long known that there is simply far more information at any given moment than our conscious minds can process. Indeed, that part of our experience we call consciousness is an important, but tiny aspect of how humans learn. Most of the information we collect and store about the world is done unconsciously. 

As Annie Murphy Paul writes in her book The Extended Mind, "As we proceed through each day, we are continuously apprehending and storing regularities in our experience, tagging them for future reference. Through this information-gathering and pattern-identifying process, we come to know things — but we’re typically not able to articulate the content of such knowledge or to ascertain just how we came to know it. This trove of data remains mostly under the surface of consciousness, and that’s usually a good thing. Its submerged status preserves our limited stores of attention and working memory for other uses."

The more we learn about human cognition and consciousness, the more we come to see that the lion's share of what we know we've learned without knowing we've learned it, which is how most learning happens as we play. From this perspective, standard schooling, the kind most of us remember from our own youth, is beginning to look more and more like a system designed to limit learning.

I've often heard parents ask their children at pick up time, "What did you learn today?" It's usually a fruitless inquiry, especially in a play-based setting. Even asking the more concrete question, "What did you do today?" often produces meager results. "Who did you play with?" is usually a more successful question, but parents who really get how learning through play works, will not ask a question at all, but rather say something like, "I saw there was easel painting this morning," or "I noticed the train tracks were out," or "Your teacher said there would be fresh play dough today."

The kids still might not give them what they want, but the odds go way up that these prompts will help them remember stories from their day. And it's by listening to the children tell their stories about what they did and experienced and wondered that we can gain genuine insight into what they've learned, what they are still learning, and what they don't quite yet understand. 

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, you might want to join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning. This is a  deep dive into transforming your classroom, home, or playground into the kind of learning environment in which young children thrive; in which novelty and self-motivation stand at the center of learning. In my decades as an early childhood educator, I've found that nothing improves my teaching and the children's learning experience more than a supportive classroom, both indoors and out. This course is for educators, parents, and directors. Registration closes this week! This cohort started yesterday, but if you join today, you won't be behind. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. I hope you join us! To learn more and register, click here.

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!