"How Many Times Have I Told You . . ."

A friend recently purchased a new home. The first thing she did was paint the walls, because, as she said, the old color depressed her.

We all know that our surroundings can have a significant impact on how we feel and even behave. And this is even more true for young children.

A long unobstructed hallway “tells” children to run.

A mobile hanging from the ceiling says to jump, or climb, in order to reach it.

Furniture arranged in a circle suggests a race track.

A room that echoes, urges children to shout.

Sand and water say, "Dig!" and "Build bridges!"

In frustration, we say things like, “How many times have I told you not to run in the hallway?” because, indeed, we’ve said it countless times, while the hallway itself is telling children just the opposite. No wonder they often look so confused when we scold them.

Our classrooms, playgrounds, and homes are in constant communication with the children, but the best learning environments are ones that engage in a two-way dialog. 

As an educator, a big part of my job is considering what the learning environment is "saying" to the children. And it's not just how the furniture is arranged. It's everything that isn't human, including temperature, lighting, schedules, and even my educational philosophy. I begin my day before the children arrive, working with my environment – “the third teacher” – to make sure that we are on the same page. When we can offer children the kind of safe and beautiful place in which they are free to engage, in which the messages they receive are consistent, and where learning – not behavior – stands at the center, we are offering children what I call a natural habitat for learning.

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into a full-capacity 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. 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 me! 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!

Even Our Words Can Be Loose Parts

"No climbing to the top!"

When our daughter was in kindergarten, her school installed an amazing rope-and-steel climbing structure. The kindergartners were forbidden from climbing to the very top, which meant that adults were always hovering around the thing, "reminding" the children when they got too high. 

One day, I asked her if she was loving the new climber. She replied, "It's kind of in the way. No one plays on it." When I asked her why, she just shrugged, "It's just not fun."

Yesterday, I posted some thoughts on The Theory of Loose Parts. Appropriately, it is an idea that has emerged from the field of architecture about how the best learning environments are those in which we have permission to shape and manipulate our surroundings, and the things found within our surroundings, to suit our needs, ideas and curiosity.

It's a theory that's generally thought of in terms of the physical environment, but no matter how loose the parts, no matter how flexible the space, if the environment does not grant permission to engage freely, then the children, as loose parts theorist Simon Nicholson puts it, will still be cheated.

That's what happened at our daughter's school. The adults, in their concern about safety (or perhaps liability), had sucked the joy out of it. They would have been better off not installing the thing at all. Or installing a shorter one. Or, the way we did it at Woodland Park, not have a climbing structure at all, but rather provide the materials -- scraps of wood, shipping pallets, car tires, ropes -- from which the children could build their own "climbers."

And at our school, that's what the children did. None so high as the one on our daughter's kindergarten playground, of course, but always just the right height for the children creating it. Not only that, these impromptu structures were never in the way because the moment the kids were done with it, the parts were on the move, being put to other uses. 

But this didn't happen just because we provided the parts. It wasn't even just because they were "loose." This kind of self-motivated loose play can only happen when children know they have permission to follow their curiosity.

At our daughter's school, the adults specifically forbid a certain type of exploration, but much of the time we let children know they don't have permission in more subtle ways. 

For instance, if you listen to the things adults are saying to children at play -- "Come here!" "Slow down!" "Be careful!" -- we hear mostly commands. Research finds that 80 percent of the sentences adults speak to young children are commands. And an environment full of commands is not an environment of permission.

We also hear a lot of school-ish questions, "What color is that?" "How many marbles do I have in my hand?" "Do you know what letter that is?" Implied in these types of questions is the idea that the adults know better than the children what to think about. But even more open-ended questions like, "What do you think will happen if you put one more block on your tower?" tend to steer children into adult approved "places" in which the parts are no longer loose. When we ask questions, we compel children to divert from their own course and onto the one we've chosen for them.

There are times for commands and questions, but if our goal is to create the kind of loose parts environments that allow children to learn at full-capacity, then we are well served to consider even our words as loose parts. When we strive to replace our commands and questions with informational statements -- "That color is red," "I have marbles in my hand," "This is the letter R" -- we are offering children information, facts, that they, like with any loose part, can use or not use.

Instead of the command "Get in the car," we might state the fact, "It's time to go" and let them do their own thinking. Instead of the command "Be careful!" we might say, "The ground below you is concrete and it will hurt if you fall on it." Instead of school-ish questions to which we already know the answers we might instead simply speculate aloud, "I wonder why the sky is blue," leaving it there for the children to consider . . . or not. 

Of course, we might also choose to just not say anything at all which is when our "third teacher," the environment, often does her best work.

We will be discussing this and much more in my course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning, a 6-week deep dive for educators, parents, and other caregivers who want to transform their classrooms, homes, and playgrounds into the kinds of "third teachers" that give children the permission to engage with the world through their curiosity, to experience the joy of self-motivated learning, and to become critical thinkers. Registration is now open for the 2024 cohort, click here to learn more. I'd love to see you there!

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of loose parts 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. Group discounts are available. 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 me! 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!

Is This Stealing Fun From the Children?

In 1971, architect Simon Nicholson wrote an article for a magazine called Landscape Architecture entitled “How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts.” Perhaps it wasn’t the first time that the phrase “loose parts play” was used, but it was this manifesto that in many ways kicked things off. In the half century since its publication, the idea has grown, first slowly, and then suddenly in recent years as more and more early childhood educators have embraced Nicholson’s theory a part of their play-based programs.

That the theory emerged from architecture is fascinating to think about. It echoes the work of Reggio Emilia founder Loris Malaguzzi who was at about the same time postulating that children had three teachers: adults, other children, and the environment, the environment being the primary purview of architecture. Nicholson’s theory, as he phrased it in that original article:

In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.

Nicholson was not talking exclusively about early childhood, but about educational environments in general. He included playgrounds and classrooms in his discussion, but also places for all ages, like museums and libraries. His big idea was that we are most inventive and creative when allowed to construct, manipulate, and otherwise play with our environments. He argued that when we leave the design of spaces to professionals, we are, in effect, excluding children (and adults) from the most important, and fun, part of the process. We are, in his words, “stealing” it from the children.

Even if we haven’t consciously adopted the theory of loose parts play, every early childhood professional, even those working in otherwise highly structured environments, knows this to be true. None of us would, for instance, build a block structure for the children, then expect them to learn anything by merely looking at it and listening to us lecture. We know that the children must take those blocks in hand, must both construct and deconstruct, must experiment, test, and manipulate. We also know that their play, and therefore their learning, is expanded as we add more and varied materials to their environment.

The theory of loose parts applies the principles of the “block area” to the entire environment (which is, not coincidentally, the focus of my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning) encouraging us to let go of our ideas of how a learning environment is supposed to be and to instead fill it with variables, things that can be moved, manipulated, and transported. This, as Nicholson points out, is where creativity and inventiveness live. It’s important to remember that his theory continues to be a radical one, even as aspects of it are becoming more mainstream. This is about more than tree cookies and toilet paper tubes and clothes pins. It’s about more than old tires, shipping pallets, and planks of wood. At its core, the theory of loose parts is a theory about democracy, about self-governance, and the rights and responsibilities of both individuals and groups to come together to shape their world according to their own vision.

The world is always ours to shape and when we are not shaping it, it is shaping us. Nicholson’s insight was that our environment is too often a kind of dictator, one that is restricting rather than expanding our possibilities. As we work with our “third teacher” it’s important that we keep this in mind and always ask ourselves, “Is this stealing the fun from the children?”

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of loose parts 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. 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 me! 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!

Preschool as a Place to "Finish" Using Junk

Auke-Florian Hiemstra/Naturalis Biodiversity Center

There was a street light just outside the living room window of my second-story downtown Seattle apartment. On top of the light fixture were ugly spikes, fixed there to prevent birds from landing on it. As far as I could tell, it worked. Nearby trees were populated with urban birds, but they left this particular street lamp alone, even as just down the block an un-spiked light was home to a crow's nest for at least one mating season.

Not long ago, I read a fascinating article in The Guardian about corvids, crows and magpies in this case, using strips of these anti-bird spikes to construct their nests in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Scotland. What a stunning example of cross-species nose-thumbing! (If, indeed, corvids had noses or thumbs.)

The magpies seem to be particularly enterprising, building their dome-shaped nests while apparently positioning the spikes to project outward and upward in order to fend-off predators. It's almost like they took a look at our attempts to thwart them, thought "Good idea," and made it their own.

Birds are, of course, notorious for using human garbage in their nest building, just as rats, raccoons, cockroaches, hermit crabs, and other species have learned to thrive on our species' unique genius for producing massive quantities of waste. Homo sapiens have, throughout our 300,000 or so years of existence, always been prone to producing excessive amounts of waste. One of the primary ways anthropologists study our ancient ancestors is to study the kitchen middens (i.e., garbage dumps) they left behind. We don't know why this is the case, but my theory is that as we evolved the ability to perceive the arrow of time (something that physicists tell us doesn't actually exist) we began to prepare for the prospect of an uncertain tomorrow by producing more than we needed today instead of simply living in the "enough-ness" of the ever-emerging present as our animal sisters and brothers seem to do.

When I read this story, I couldn't help but reflect on the children I've observed playing over the decades on our junkyard playground. I always envisioned our school, and our outdoors space in particular, as a place where we "finished" using stuff that was otherwise on the way to the landfill. Just as corvids and other animals cleverly use our refuse, I've found that young children have a special genius for finding remarkable, creative ways to incorporate shipping pallets, old tires, parts of broken toys, containers, wine corks, bottle caps, and other societal garbage into their games. In fact, more often than not, when given the choice, they will prefer the "real stuff" of recycling bins, garages, cellars, and attics to the toys and games specifically manufactured for them. Oh sure, they've been taught to beg for the latest shiny toy and are thrilled to received it as a birthday gift, but we all know that by the end of the day, most children, most of the time, have at least as much fun with the boxes and wrapping paper, the excess we produce in the process of gift-giving.

Again, I don't know why young children, like corvids, so often express their genius through playing with our garbage, but I expect that the reason they prefer the boxes over the toys is that most toys (and most out-of-the-box playground equipment) come with a "script" built into them: there is a proscribed, or "right," way to play with them. Whereas when playing with refuse, children write their own scripts, and that, ultimately is the real story of human learning. 

In these magpie nests made from anti-bird spikes, I see the "nests" that young children create from the odds and ends at hand, the games they invent, and the stories they play using waste to create something new and meaningful. I see the power of a learning environment at work, supporting children to think critically and creatively, rather than directing them according to scripts. I see the opening up of new possibilities rather than the habit of the well-trodden ruts of "because we've always done it that way." I see the transformation of problems into opportunities -- anti-bird spikes into nests.

This is a natural habitat for learning. If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of learning environment, please join the 2025 cohort for my 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning (see below). This is the kind of open-ended, real world learning environment in which not just corvids, but all animals thrive, including humans. 

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If you're interested in transforming your own space into this kind of loose parts learning environment, you might want to join the 2024 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. Group discounts are available. You don't want to miss this chance to make your "third teacher" (the learning environment) the best it can be. Registration is closing soon. I hope you join me! 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!