In PHQP_0009 Caregiver Self-Care Is Important, Jeff stresses the vital role of recharging for caregivers. On this Playvolution HQ Podcast episode, learn why self-care isn’t selfish but an investment in emotional energy for kids, colleagues, and loved ones. Plus, a DIY explosion activity with film canisters, seven adult responses to child-led play, and innovative loose parts use. Plus, a gravity-defying Dad Joke of the Week!

Watch Now: PHQP_0009 Caregiver Self-Care Is Important

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play…on with the show.

So, I was really looking forward to starting the show off with a little bit of conversation about how I really love watching concrete buckle and decay and crack over time. But that got pushed out of the way because a hunk of concrete I was watching buckle and crack and break down over time made a big change and a couple of hunks of it broke loose. And I was all excited to talk about that.

But then I noticed on a recent walk that they were gone. And then I saw them and I was delighted because as we talked about one, play grows from inside the player and two, loose parts are awesome. A couple of neighborhood kids picked them up and they were using these hunks of concrete as bases at the local playground for a kid version of baseball.

Now, it wasn’t baseball because they didn’t have nine people to make, enough people to make out nine people on each team and it was just five or six of them playing. But they were making it work because again, play comes from within child. And they found these, they found the bits and pieces they needed to make a field and play commenced and that’s awesome.

So play is sparked by the minds of the children playing and loose parts are awesome. Just a little bit of follow up on those two things here. We’ll talk about my joy of observing concrete fall apart later.

Topic one, core values. Part nine, like I mentioned last time, we’re talking about caregiver self-care and its importance. Because the work of a caregiver is to be emotionally available, to be present in the moment with the children.

That means being right here, right now. And that’s really difficult. We talked about that in one of the earlier episodes about being right here, right now as being the core.

But what that does is it takes a lot of emotional labor. There’s plenty of physical labor in early learning but a big part of it is that emotional labor because we’re giving our emotional resources away all the time and it’s a limited resource. And so we’re doling it out little bit by little bit by little bit all day long to the kids in our care, to our coworkers, to the parents we work with in our program, maybe to the administrators we work with.

We’re trying to bring some home to our sweetie pie and maybe our children and dog, your house plant. You wanna be present for them too. And it’s really easy to get drained.

And it turns out that professional caregivers are often very, very good at the doing of the emotional labor but they fall short when it comes to the flip side of that, the taking care of themselves side. And that can really be a problem because if you don’t fill your cup up again, you run out of resources to give. And one reason I hear for caregivers not taking care of themselves, I’ve written two books of this topic and I’ve been talking about it for over 20 years in trainings is sometimes people feel selfish but self-care isn’t selfish.

Self-care is an investment in yourself and in the investment in the quality of work that you do with other people and the quality of the relationships you have with the people important to you. So we need to really make time for that self-care. You can’t pour from an empty cup.

You have to fill yourself up. And so you need to make time to invest in your own needs. And what that looks like is gonna differ from person to person.

What refreshes and rejuvenates and makes somebody else ready to get in there and do this work might be stressful to somebody else. So you gotta find your thing and make time for it. Maybe it’s exercise, maybe it’s gardening, maybe it’s reading, maybe it’s fiber work, knitting, crocheting, quilting, that kind of thing.

But you need to make time for your own thing to fill you up along with eating well and getting a good night’s sleep. You are an emotional charging station. So really the big part of this is children get emotionally worn out themselves and they come to us to be charged up.

And we give away that emotional energy, that reserve, and then we don’t have anything left for ourselves or for our families or for the rest of the day because being right here right now can be really, really draining. So if you’re gonna be a charging station, you’ve gotta have a regular supply of current to do the charging for the others, which means you need to invest in self-care. And that’s exactly what self-care is.

Self-care is an investment, an investment in your mindset, an investment in your mood. And if you’re gonna do this job for any length of time, it’s really important that you build a professional self-care practice. Now, there’s a link in the show notes.

We’ve got a whole section at the PlayvolutionHQ.com website that’s devoted to self-care. There’s probably 100, 150 articles over there that you can go through and you can find some stuff. And I do online trainings on this topic as well.

If you’ve got questions and you’re too tired to look for resources yourself, send me an email, I’ll send you some things. Topic two, fun with explosions. This is a video I put together a while ago because, well, exploding stuff is fun.

And this is the simple way and inexpensive way that you can help kids have fun with explosions. Let’s go to that video now. Hey, Jeff Johnson, Explorations Early Learning here.

Thanks for pushing play. I’ve got a DIY idea for you, fun with explosions. Nothing mixes better than young children and explosions is my mind.

So here’s a way to make it fun, keep it safe. But first, a history lesson. So back in the day, there were these things called cameras that we used to use to take pictures.

And it was a whole big deal. You’d put the stuff called film in the cameras and you’d take the pictures and you’d take the film out of the cameras and you’d put them in one of these little film canisters and bring them to the Photoshop and then, I mean, way back in the day, it took like a week to get your pictures back and then they got it under 24 hours and then an hour and then maybe half your pictures didn’t turn out because like grandma was all blurry or something. Anyway, it was a dark time, but one of the great things about it was these little film canisters.

So they have, they’re small and they have tightly fitting lids and they work great for these explosions. Now, when we were transitioning from film cameras to digital, these things became hard to find, but now they’re available online. I’ve got in the show notes a link to an Amazon product that I’m happy with because you need good fitting lids and some of them available have loose fitting lids which leave you with questionable explosions.

And so let’s get to the DIY part of this process. So what you need is you need some of those film canisters filled about three quarters full of water and I’ve colored the water. You can do that too.

It makes for a more exciting explosion. Also makes it a little bit messier. You might wanna have a towel on hand.

I’ve got everything in a pie pan because that kinda contains the mess a little bit if you’re mess adverse. I also marked the lids with a Sharpie as you can see because that makes them a little bit easier to find when they hit the floor and they fly quite a ways. Usually they will hit the ceiling if you’re inside and then bounce.

If you’re outside, I’ve seen them go 20, 25 feet in the air. And then in addition to all of that stuff, you need some antacid tablets. Now Elka Seltzer is the go-to name brand I think in most places, but the generic store brands work just fine and cost less.

So they’re just little wafers. And what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna drop the wafers into the canisters, put the lids on real fast and some CO2 gas is gonna build up until there’s so many CO2 bubbles in there, they can’t contain themselves anymore literally and then they blow the top off of that film canister. After an explosion like this, if you refill the canister fast enough, there’s probably two or three explosions in each one of these wafers if you get them refilled and recapped really quick.

So let’s give it a go. I’m gonna try two at once. Oh, this is the exciting part, this waiting.

There, there we go. I just got pink and blue all over my computer. That was good fun.

So just for fun, oh, I got blur, excuse me. I got blurry because goo hit my camera. So the other day, just for fun, I filmed a couple explosions in slow motion and we’ll go out with those.

I love that pop. Also in the blog post I put up with this, I’ll have some pictures of some kids back in the day at that moment that explosions happens. I’ve got some photos.

Hope you like the idea. There’s a longer write up, including more information about the chemical process going on in an explosion. It’s a fun STEM exploration idea for kids and I promise you they will have a good time with it.

Okay, back from the video. I hope you enjoyed that. On to topic three and this, this is something kind of related to what we talked about before.

Seven common adult responses to child-led play. Now last episode, I talked about how play comes from the child. The spark for the play starts in here and that often leads to play that you may not care for or feel that you need to support.

Rough and tumble, death, weapons, those kind of thing and maybe all kinds of play that you’re cool with but our response to this kind of play matters and so I put together this kind of matrix of the different ways adults respond to kids’ choices in play and so I thought we could talk about it a little bit here. The link is in the show notes and you can check that out. It’s a one-page PDF that you can use yourself or share with others.

So one is, the first one is full support. This is cheering them on. This is intentionally devoting classroom space for the activities the kids are choosing to engage in.

That’s one way we should support them and ideally, that’s where we wanna get to with all of the types of play the kids are choosing as long as we’re also maintaining everybody else’s health and safety. The next one up there is passive acceptance. So sometimes we’ll just, maybe we’re not full support of it but we’re gonna let it happen and some of you might feel this way about weapons play or superhero play, those kind of things.

You know the kids are benefiting from it and you’re not a real big supporter but you’re gonna give them the autonomy to do their own thing. Next up is subtle disapproval. This is the silent critic.

This is we’re kind of clicking our tongue to ourself. We kind of undermine the freedom and self-direction by introducing doubt without clear interference. What this might look like is a caregiver shakes their head and frowns as children throw pretend punches during superhero play.

And so kids are getting the message that, yeah, this is still going on but is there something wrong with it because of the way their teacher, their adult, their parent is looking at them. And then there’s controlled play. This is where the freedom is lost.

Adults allow the activity but impose rules and boundaries that strip it of the freedom and self-direction essential to true play. So this is when we start moving away from Gray’s conditions of play and instead of being real play, it becomes more of a play-like activity because when it’s real play, the players are creating their own rules. When you start imposing your rules from the outside, you’re eroding that autonomy of that choice and you’re taking the play away from them.

So a concerned caregiver might allow the play as long as her rules are followed. You can wrestle as long as you stay in the grass and don’t get too wild or whatever it is. And again, it’s better than shutting down the play completely but it’s not as free as we had earlier on this continuum.

And then there’s directed play. It’s time for a change where the adult comes in and reduces self-direction by replacing child-led play with adult-imposed activities. The frustrated caregiver might snap.

This is getting out of control. Let’s stop wrestling and play a game of Simon Says. So we actually, in here we get into the actually shutting down the play.

And then there’s explicit rejection. This is a hard no. This is the kind of stuff that it starts and we shut it down right away.

Wrestling is not allowed here. Find something else to do. And so there’s not even a version of it that can be so forwarded.

And then finally there’s complete prohibition, not allowing it ever. No roughhousing it at preschool. If I catch you, there’s gonna be consequences.

And so those are some very distinct differences from fully supporting to complete prohibition. And so the challenge, I think, is to ask yourself where you are on that continuum and see if you can kind of move yourself up towards the more supportive versions of responding to those kinds of play. And so it’s just kind of a tool that can be used for checking where you are along those lines.

It might be, I don’t think it’s gonna change your life, but it might be a useful tool to check out. So that’s seven common adult responses to child-led play. What do we got next? Well, it’s time to wrap up this episode.

So first, check out the HQ self-care links. Invest time in self-care. You’re worth it.

The other thing I hear is you don’t have time. And look, time can be a real big thing. My suggestion is make time.

You might be doing versions of self-care that aren’t very effective, like scrolling social media, for example. And so taking some of that likely ineffective things you’re doing and look for more effective ways to take care of yourself would be beneficial. And there’s some links to help you in that direction over at the Playvolution HQ site.

Link is in the show notes. Amazon ID, I got for you this. Oh, we skipped the Amazon ID.

Amazon ID, I got for you this. But somebody’s just been buying their tea through the Amazon link. And this is a great way to buy the show.

If there’s something you’re buying on a regular basis over there at the Amazon and you wanna support the show, do that buying through my Amazon portal and it supports the website and the podcast and is greatly appreciated. So thank you if you’re doing that. Share it if you like it, the podcast and the links at Playvolution HQ.

And next week, we’re gonna get into mixed age groups. I’ve been tidying up the Playvolution HQ site so I’ve got some good links there for you. And we’ll delve into that.

That’s some Lillian cats probably coming at you next week. Dad joke of the week. Here we go, you ready for this? I’m reading a book on gravity.

It’s impossible to put down. Impossible. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast.

Thanks for listening. Back soon. Bye-bye.

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Brought to you by Explorations Early Learning

In PHQP 0008, Play Is Sparked By The Child Not The Toy, Jeff explains that children’s minds, not toys, ignite play; experiences and knowledge drive creativity and self-directed learning. Jeff also unpacks actor-observer bias in the classroom, outlines five key developmental domains, and delivers a classic Dad Joke of the Week. Bonus: bagpipe tunes and STEM-friendly spring scales get a shoutout!

Watch Now: PHQP_0008 Play Is Sparked By The Child Not The Toy

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So, I’m going to start with a little bit of a bagpipe update. I mentioned in an earlier episode that I was going through a bagpipe music spree, rabbit hole, and somebody reached out to find out if one that was true. Yes, yes it was.

I’m past that now. I’ve moved on to other things. And what my favorite bagpipe music was.

And I think if you go to Spotify, I mean, or where else on the web, you can go to find the goddesses of bagpipes. It’s these three young ladies that play bagpipe. And I think if you’re looking for a song, try Don’t Stop Believing.

The bagpipe version of Don’t Stop Believing is pretty darn enjoyable. So, check that out. Also, if you’ve got a favorite bagpipe tune, let me know about it.

Let’s get into this topic one, part eight of our core value series. We’re going to be getting out of this. I think there’s 10 or 12 total that I’ve got put together.

Part eight, we’re going to be talking about the idea that play is sparked by the child, not the toy. Just because you’ve got a piece of plastic broccoli does not mean you’re going to be interested in playing with plastic broccoli. The interest in what we want to play, what kids want to engage in their play, begins in their minds.

It’s based on what they’ve experienced, what they’ve seen, what they’ve thought about, what they’ve imagined, what they enjoy, what they’re scared of. But all play begins up here between our ears. And this is why the first condition of play is that play is selected by the players.

Because if you are forced into an activity that isn’t on your mind, that you’re not interested in, that doesn’t have value to you, that doesn’t start here, you’re not going to be really engaged fully in it. And therefore, it’s not going to meet the full definition of play. So play starts in our minds.

Toys are tools for advancing that play. So back to play begins in the mind. If you have a child who is interested in, oh, say, superheroes, because they watch a lot of superhero movies and they play superhero video games and they have superhero books and superheroes are always on their mind, they’re going to show up at your program and want to be superheroes.

If you have a child that is really into puppies, puppies are probably going to show up in their play. And we need to figure out a way to support that as adults, as caregivers and parents. Toys are the tools for telling those stories.

We’ve talked earlier in an earlier episode, we got into the definition of loose parts. This is why loose parts are so valuable because they are flexible and can take on lots of different roles based on what the kids are interested in. This is why, I mean, the empty cardboard box is an ideal toy that should be available in multiple sizes and shapes in early learning programs because they offer so much.

One day that cardboard box might be a time machine, the next day it might be an x-ray machine, the next day it might be a cave where a bear lives, and on and on and on. A lot of the adult planned toys, they’re not as valuable for supporting all of children’s play because they come with a built-in story to them. We’ll talk about that in future episodes, but imagine a Batman figurine.

If you’re not into playing Batman, that Batman figurine isn’t very valuable for you. It’s very hard for a child to turn a Batman figurine into another character because that character is so ingrained with their backstory. We like to think about toys as tools for supporting the play, not as the spark for the play.

The power is in the player. It’s not in the toy. The player is the one that’s making all these decisions.

This is why we’ve got to create environments where children are able to do that choosing and support the kinds of play that they decide to bring to our environments. That can be hard because sometimes the types of play that they want to bring to your environment, you might not want to or feel you should support. Rough and tumble play, running, climbing, a lot of these things.

A lot of the things we talked about last week when we were talking about the sensory systems, I believe, are sparked by the interest in superheroes and those kinds of things. Weapons play. If children are watching TV shows and movies and playing video games or experiencing in real life weapons, weapons are going to show up in their play.

We need to figure out a way to support that play. Knowledge and experience fuel play, not the objects. If you’re looking for a takeaway from this, there’s a one-sentence takeaway.

Knowledge and experiences fuel play, not objects. It starts up here. Also, even knowledge and experiences you dislike, we’ve got to remember that.

If we’re not into weapons play or superhero play or death play or loud play or play that involves a lot of big body activity, we’ve got to figure out a way to support those environments anyway if we truly want to meet kids where they are and allow them to create real play for themselves. The takeaway question is, how can you better support the play that the children create in your environments?

If we can continually ask ourselves that question and reassess our environment and tweak our environment based on those answers, we create environments where children are able to engage in large, long blocks of time where they engage in self-directed, uninterrupted play and exploration. That’s what the goal should be for early learning programs.

Topic two, actor-observer bias. This is an article I put together in the early learning glossary I’m building over at playvolutionhq.com. There’s a couple hundred entries there now. This is kind of an interesting thing.

Here’s the article if you’re watching the video. Hey, if you’re listening to the audio version, great. I appreciate it.

If you want to check out the video when I talk about things like these, in the show notes, there is always a link to the video version. Even if you’re getting the audio version on your podcast app of choice, you can always access the video versions there. You can subscribe to the video versions at playvolutionhq.com. Actor-observer bias is the tendency for people to attribute their behavior to external factors while explaining others’ behavior as a result of internal traits or choices.

This bias can affect how we perceive and judge actions. The bias can also shape our expectations and responses to behavior in the classroom dynamics. For example, if I’m late someplace, it’s because traffic was bad and I couldn’t find my keys.

If somebody else is late, it’s because they are lazy and they’re never on time and they don’t know how to get themselves places. And there’s a big difference there. We always give ourselves the benefit of doubt, and we don’t always do that with other people.

Later on, we’ve got actor-observer bias occurs when individuals evaluate their own actions differently from how they evaluate others’ actions. When we are the actor, we justify our behavior based on situational factors. I was late because traffic was bad.

But when we are the observer, we blame the individual. She was late because she’s irresponsible. Now, this bias is a natural part of human perception.

It’s wired into us. And there are some good reasons for it, because we have direct access to our own experiences but must infer the reasons other people are behaving and acting the way they are. So we’re wired to kind of make those guesses, but those guesses can often get in the way.

And so with kids, if we’ve got a distracted learner, so maybe a child, we have a child who seems disengaged during outdoor storytime, maybe seen as not paying attention, when in reality, that child might be processing the story in their own way, struggling with sensory input, like an itchy shirt, or thinking about the butterfly that just fluttered by. And so often our biases, what we observe with children, we filter it through this lens that gives us this maybe not correct vision of them. And over time, once adult judgments kind of have reoccurred a couple of times, our actor-observer bias can reinforce those perceptions.

So a child that we kind of perceive as being a troublemaker or irresponsible or rowdy kind of gets labeled that way. And then we have that bias towards them in other situations. And that can really, really affect the relationship and our engagement with them.

I’m going to skip that, give you something to read if you go check out the article. Mitigating actor-observer bias in early learning. So we can do some things about it.

One thing we can do is we can pause before reacting. Another thing we can do is encourage perspective-taking. Modeling and teaching children to consider others’ perspectives, and doing that ourselves, is a way to get out of the habit of actor-observer bias.

We can reflect on our own biases. We can use open-ended questions and try to suss out what’s actually going on and get a clearer view of things. And we can offer second chances.

When we start labeling, when we become aware that we started labeling something with this bias, we can kind of pull back and decide we’re not going to do that anymore and realize that that child is still a work in progress. The article’s there at playevolutionhq.com, link in the show notes if you are inclined to go check it out. So that’s actor-observer bias.

What we got up next, topic three, I wanted to touch a little bit on five key developmental domains. And so a developmental domain, and we’re getting this in here early because this is going to come back, we might end up doing a whole episode on each of these. But a developmental domain, just think of them as file drawers or silos.

Because adults, we like to break up and categorize in short things. And we’ve done that kind of with learning. And so we kind of break learning down into these little subcomponents so it’s more orderly for us.

Now children don’t just learn in one of these domains at a time. Children can be learning things in multiple domains at any one time. But for our understanding, we like to break it down.

And if you start looking for developmental domains online, you’ll come up with most, there’s a lot of versions out there, most have four to eight categories. I’ve put this one together, this is kind of a hybrid I put together that kind of works for me. And this is pretty much the way I’m reorganizing things on the Playvolution HQ site.

And so there’s a PDF handout that I put together, there’ll be a link in the show notes. And so the key developmental domains I put together are one, social-emotional. And I think we can all understand that that’s one category of learning kids engage in.

This is a focus on emotional well-being and the ability to form and maintain relationships. Communicative development. Other domain schema will call this something like language and literacy maybe for example.

So communicative involves the development of language and communication skills. Not only written skills and spoken language, but also body language fits in there. Hand gestures, facial expressions, those kind of things.

Those are all key components the way we communicate. And so that gets stuck in its own little file drawer cabinet. Physical domain encompasses the growth and coordination and sensory integration of a child’s body.

And so this is a big one, this is what we talked about with the sensory systems, this is what we talked about in the episode where we dug into the fact that we humans learn by moving. The physical domain is very, very important in the early years because it’s wiring those sensory systems and preparing the body for everything it’s going to do for the next 70 or 80 or 90 years. And so we need large muscle activity, we need small muscle activity, and we need lots of sensory activity in the early years.

And the adaptive domain focuses on acquiring essential self-care skills and learning to navigate the world. And so adaptive, this is one that gets left out of a lot of the domains. The other four here are pretty common.

Adaptive kind of gets set to the side sometimes or integrated into the others, but I think it deserves its own category because this is really, really important. Think about the adaptive domain as the stuff you need to know to get along in the world. Those skills and information for navigating and caring for yourself in the world.

And finally, the cognitive domain involves mental processes related to learning, problem solving, and understanding. I’ve purposely put this last on the list because in a lot of early learning settings, we rush so fast in the cognitive stuff and we forget or gloss over the importance of the physical or the adaptive. But they’re all important.

And again, children can be learning in multiple or maybe all of these domains at any one time when they’re sitting. Just a simple activity like sitting and playing with the Play-Doh with a couple of peers is an opportunity because they’ve got maybe a small muscle development going on. If they got a lot of Play-Doh, maybe it’s large muscle.

But there’s conversation going on, undoubtedly. They’re asking for the rolling pin and they’re talking about the colors that they’re getting when they’re mixing colors together. They’re maybe arguing and bickering about one of the cookie cutters they want to use.

And they’re talking about going to grandma’s after the preschool day is over. So there’s all that conversation. There’s always social emotional stuff going on when you’ve got groups of children engaging together.

They’re learning to self-regulate. They’re learning to take turns. They’re learning to survive having their feelings hurt when they don’t get the cookie cutter that they want right away.

All of these things kind of fit into the adaptive domain. And then there’s the cognitive stuff when they’re making the little balls with the Play-Doh or rolling out the big long snakes and figuring out that this color and this color make that color. That’s all kind of the cognitive stuff going on.

And it’s just there with play. And so when we’re creating real child-led play environments, what we should really be thinking about is not setting up lessons that focus on each of these domains, but getting better at seeing these domains in the activities the children are choosing. So we trust them to choose their play because it starts in here for them.

And then when we’re trying to map out, to document their learning, we look for learning in these different domains in the play that we’re seeing. Whether it’s Play-Doh play or superhero play or rough-and-tumble play or sitting and reading books or whatever it is, we can find these developmental domain activities if we look for them. And so becoming better observers is part of that process, if that makes sense.

And again, the link to this handout is in the show notes. So time to wrap things up. I guess the big takeaway for the episode is pay attention to that spark.

What is sparking play in the children in your program? Because if we can figure out what’s sparking them, the dinosaur kid, the superhero kid, then we can create, we can tailor the environment to meet the needs of the play they’re interested in and then step back and kind of observe the learning that’s happening in those different domains. So look for these sparks. The Amazon ID I want to go to this week, somebody purchased a set of these, a set of spring scales, 10 transparent spring scales.

And so these are great for having around outside and inside to just give kids an opportunity to weigh things. It’s a chance for some STEM play. It’s a chance to bump into numbers and the concept of weight and other things.

And so those are a good thing. If you want to support the show, check out that Amazon link in the show notes. What else we got going on here? Again, share it if you like it.

The Playvolution HQ site is there for the sharing, as is this podcast. I’m not on the social media. So the way things get shared is people find stuff and like it and share it with somebody else who might like it.

I greatly appreciate people who go out and share things that they feel are share worthy. So thank you for that. Next week, we’re going to get into caregiver self-care because all the stuff we’ve talked about is a lot easier if you, the caregiver, whether you’re a parent, professional, is taking better care of yourself.

Dad joke of the week, we’re running behind. Why was the calendar afraid? It’s days were numbered. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast.

Thanks for listening. Back soon. See, I said we’re going to keep these episodes under 20 minutes.

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Brought to you by Explorations Early Learning

In PHQP 0007 Humans Are In Motion Learners, Jeff explores why movement is essential for learning, creativity, and emotional regulation. He discusses how modern children are more sedentary than ever and why early learning environments should prioritize child-led motion. Drawing from Brain Rules by John Medina, Jeff highlights how active engagement with the world wires the brain’s sensory systems and supports deeper learning. He also shares a simple trick for stopping kids from over-pumping soap and reflects on the excitement of a rare Gulf Coast snowfall. Jeff hopes the episode holds up despite forgetting to wear his glasses and a fumbled outro transition. Plus, don’t miss the Dad Joke of the Week!

Watch Now: PHQP_0007 Humans Are In Motion Learners

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So, first up, my dog Gigi was very happy the other day. We got some snow here at the beach where we live on the Gulf Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, I don’t care what you call it. It doesn’t happen here very often.

She was very excited. She likes going to the beach, but we ended up with about seven, eight inches of snow, and she was a very happy dog. Back when we lived in Iowa, she would go out when it was below freezing and make herself a little snow nest and lay there for hours.

So, she was glad to have a snow experience, which brings us to topic one, bright, shiny objects. For a lot of people here along the coast, it was a bright, shiny object moment because a lot of them didn’t have any experience with snow. Snow is really rare here.

We had seven inches a couple weeks ago. Last snow before that that was 93 and 63 and five snow events in 130 years, if I did the math halfway close to right. It’s not much snow.

So, we had interactions with lots of humans, very young humans and older humans, who had no memory, no experience with snow. So, it became a very interesting variable in their environment, which if you recall a couple episodes ago, we talked about loose parts as being variables in the environment with which people could interact. There was a lot of interacting going on, a lot of kids and adults building their first snowmen and tasting snow for the first time.

I was talking the day before the snow hit. I was talking to a little eight-year-old girl, and she was very excited to taste snow, but not the yellow kind. She made sure I was very clear on that because she’s heard you’re not supposed to taste the yellow snow.

And so, these variables in our environment are really important and something we should look for, whether we’re planning them ourselves or whether they just kind of plop themselves into our environment, because it’s a chance for a new experience. If you’ve never met snow, you may have theories about what snow is like, but you don’t have any actual hands-on experience. I saw kids out, not a lot of winter clothes here on the coast either.

It gets a little bit chilly, but not cold. And so, kids out with multiple sweatshirts on and like every pair of sweatpants they had on and socks on their hands for gloves and having a good time with it. It’s that experience is where the learning happens for kids and adults.

One of the takeaways for us with this kind of thing is to remember how new the world was to us when we were young children, because I think a lot of times we gloss over that. We forget the fact that little kids, even three, four, five, six, seven, eight-year-olds are still very, very new to the world and they haven’t had a lot of experiences or repeated a lot of experiences. And so, very much, they find new things almost every day in their lives.

A three-year-old who gets handed something as mundane as a stapler for the first time is going to be pretty amped up and excited to experiment with that new thing. And so, one of the ways we can support loose parts play and those random things that happen to be new experiences in our lives is to pause for a moment and remember how new and fresh they probably are for those children and slow down to take time to explore them. Luckily, the world ground to a halt down here for what up north would have been a very mild snow event.

We need to also embrace children’s interest in that newness. And that doesn’t really take much. Again, it’s that time and really that mental space to explore and interact, I think, is the best thing we can do to promote it.

There were some kids here in the neighborhood that weren’t out exploring the snow because it was apparently too novel and their adults were worried about safety, even with something much of the world deals with on a regular basis. So, embrace the interest, spend time with the new thing. Topic two.

Back in our core value series, this is part seven. Humans are in motion learners. We are built to move.

And we got a big problem because human children have never, never been more sedentary than they are right now in 2025. Children in 2024 probably moved more than children in 2025 are. Don’t hold me to that, but you get the idea.

In our modern world, kids are much more sedentary than they used to be. And kids in the 90s were more sedentary than my generation grew up in the 70s and 80s. And all we did is sit around and watch reruns of F Troop and Gilligan’s Island compared to kids in the 50s and 60s.

So, it’s been a multi-generational thing, this reduction in motion in early learning settings. And look, in some early learning programs, children literally get in trouble for moving too much. Because moving, something their body is telling them to do, is seen as a behavior problem.

And look, that’s messed up. Dr. John Medina wrote a book a number of years ago called Brain Rules. And brain rule number one has to do with the fact that we are in motion learners.

There’s a big connection to the mental process going on in our heads and the movement of our bodies. One important thing is that all of that motion wires the eight sensory systems. And without those sensory systems being well-wired and integrated with each other and the brain, we can’t learn anything.

Because the only way our brain gets information is through that active engagement with the world, with that engagement with the senses. So, we need to get kids moving more. Sedentary learners disengage.

And so, when we’re asking kids to sit still for long periods of time, and not only do we sit still, we sit still and we keep our feet still and we don’t fidget, we keep our hands to ourselves, that takes a lot of mental energy. And kids often have a very hard time paying attention to what you’re talking to them about because they’re focusing so hard on keeping their bodies still to keep from getting in trouble. And we kind of tend to space off when we’re sedentary.

Our mind isn’t as engaged as it is when we are allowed to be up and active and in motion. Moving bodies feed thinking brains. If you’re looking for a bumper sticker line, that’s probably a pretty good one.

Moving bodies feed thinking minds. And it’s very true. And this is why child-led play and exploration is so important because their children are naturally inclined to move, and so they do so in their play.

Now, there’s a wide variety of what is enough motion for any given child. Some children need to move a little bit and then they’re happy being sedentary. Some kids need to be in motion all of the time, it seems like.

And we need to create environments that support everybody along that spectrum. What do we got here next? Motion supports emotional regulation. One thing that I found in my early learning direct care experience, and I’ve heard over and over and over again for the 30 years just about that I’ve been in the field, I was making myself a little bit older than I am, it’s been going on 30 years I’ve been working in this field, is that when we create opportunities for kids to move more, behavior problems decrease.

Because we’ve created an environment where the kids are allowed to do what their body is signaling them that they need to do. And so all of that motion in the early years is preparing them to be able to sit still and focus on things a little bit more when they get a little bit older. But even we adults are probably more sedentary than we should be.

Because again, our brains thrive on that motion. So if you’re having behavior problems with that kid, one of the things you can do is think about how can I help this child move more. And then you can do away with a lot of the aggravation and the timeouts and head-butting that goes on with that child.

Movement also sparks creativity. If you’re having problems yourself solving a problem or coming up with a creative idea, one of the best things you can do is get up and get moving. And it’s the same for children.

If we want them to be creative, to connect ideas and information in unique ways, movement is a great way to spark that. And so movement wires the sensory system, it reduces behavior problems, it sparks creativity. There’s a lot to be said for it.

So the big question is, the takeaway here is, how can you fit more child-led motion into your day? How can you support giving kids the opportunity to be up and active and moving more frequently during the course of their early learning day? And look, if I say child-led, if the only way you can be comfortable with more movement is to be the director of it, do that. Because that’s better than leaving the kids sedentary. But what they really need is the opportunity for self-directed movement.

Because if you’ve got a group of eight or ten kids, not all of them are going to be interested in moving in the prescribed way that your active learning lesson might have in mind for them.

On any given day, some kid might need to be running, and somebody wants to be spinning in circles, and somebody else wants to be swinging back and forth on the swing set, and somebody else needs to be hopping, and somebody else feels like they need to be hanging upside down on the monkey bars. And that’s why giving them the choice is really important there, because it allows them to engage in the kind of physical motion, the activity that their bodies are yearning for.

So there’s a little bit of value in entrusting them to choose their own form of locomotion. Topic three, the soap dispenser trick. I was messaging with a family child care provider the other day, and she was dealing with some burnout.

And rightfully so, family child care can be a very, or all child care can be burnout inducing. But I think family child care, you might find yourself more isolated, and it might be a bigger challenge there, just because you don’t have a cohort of co-workers to rely on and vent to. So she sends me this email, and it’s got this laundry list of things that are frustrating her.

Things like, you know, that kid that she has a personality conflict with, and she let a family get behind on their bill, and she’s struggling to get that caught up with, and she feels like she never has any time for herself, and other things.

But one of the things on her list was the fact that it just annoys the heck out of her when kids take that soap dispenser in the bathroom, and they pump it, and they end up with a glob of soap on their hand that’s three times bigger than their palm, and there’s soap dripping down their hand, and it gets all over the counter. And so they’re wasting soap, they’re making a mess, she’s replacing the soap all the time, and I realized she didn’t know the soap dispenser trick.

And so if you get kids that are, because look, the inclination with a pump bottle is to push the pump all the way down, and so what you can do is you can take, for those of you who don’t know the soap dispenser trick, take a rubber band and loop it around the pump on your pump bottle, and it doesn’t just have, for soap or for lotion bottles, any kind of dispensers, and that limits the amount of travel on that pump.

And so you can adjust the size of your rubber band and the spacing there, and you can give them a little dose of soap instead of a big handful that is more than they need, and then you save soap, you save aggravation, and you save mess. And that makes life just a little bit easier.

I thought everybody knew the soap dispenser trick, and so I hadn’t even, I haven’t even brought this up before, but I think I’ll probably do a video on it as well. So I was able to share that idea with her. I can’t do anything about any of the other problems, but we were able to solve that one.

So give the soap dispenser trick a try if you are having frustrations with your soap or lotion bottle. All it takes is a rubber band. Wrapping the show up today, the takeaway is get moving.

Not only yourself, but the children in your program. Move more. It’s good for your brain, it’s good for your emotional state, it’s good for your creativity.

Nothing wrong with getting out and moving more. Gigi on the beach, she’s a very smart and creative dog because she spent so much time getting her exercise on the beach. Amazon idea of the week, if you’re a new listener, you can check out the show, the show notes.

There’s a link to my Amazon portal. You shop those links and it just sends a little bit to me since you use that link and supports the show, supports the Playvolution HQ website. Somebody purchased some of these sun hats, and look, they come in a bunch of different colors, and they’re apparently very well reviewed and really durable.

And if you’re looking to get moving on super sunny days, hats like this for all the kids are kind of a way to keep the little scalps and necks and faces from getting sunburnt. My trips to Alaska, just about all of the kids are wearing these kind of hats outside all of the time, and it makes sense. If you want kids to be up and moving, especially outside, you need to dress them for the environment.

So we got that going for us. I just had a camera problem, so I got to correct that before we move back to the other shot. There I am.

Next up, share it if you like it. The only way this podcast and the Playvolution HQ website get any support is from people who find things helpful sharing them. So I appreciate those people doing that.

Somebody reached out to me the other day. She knows that I’m not on the social media. She was wondering if she could set up, I think, a Twitter X account and share links to this site because I’m not doing it, and she wanted to know if she could do that.

And I’m not quite sure yet, but I might let that happen. I guess I wouldn’t have any control over it if she decided to do it on her own, but she reached out. Anyway, share things if you like them.

It’s much appreciated. Next week, we’re going to get into the idea that play is in the child and not in the toy. So tune in for that.

Dad joke of the week, as we wrap up, what do you call a broken can opener? You call a broken can opener a can’t opener. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Can’t opener.

Thanks for listening. Back soon. Bye-bye.

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In PHQP 0006 Don’t Neglect Sensory Integration, Jeff delves into why sensory play is essential before academics. From running and jumping to twisting and climbing, Jeff explains why early learning settins should focus more on wiring children’s sensory systems. He also explores the eight sensory systems and discusses distinguishing playful aggression from violence.

Watch Now: PHQP_0006 Don’t Neglect Sensory Integration

Hey, welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So a couple of neighborhood kids were playing a game they invented. I love self-invented kid games. I think we need to provide kids with more time to get bored and have to figure out their own games.

So there’s about four or five of them hanging around the neighborhood playground. Mostly boys. There was a couple of girls there, it was probably, you know, mid-afternoon, after school kind of stuff.

And they had a water bottle about half full of water. And the game was, you hold the water bottle out in front of you with your fingers, and then you let go of it and you try to punch it before it hits the ground. And it was, I mean, everybody takes turns and cheers if you got it, you know, moans and groans if you didn’t.

A lot of them, if they missed the punch, they tried to get it with a kick. And it was, I mean, it’s a form of power play, right? They’re showing their physical prowess or lack thereof. And lots of laughs, lots of fun, lots of good times with a simple water bottle.

We talked about defining loose parts a while ago. And this is one of the wonders of loose parts, this wonderful game using nothing but their imaginations and a half full plastic bottle of water. Yay for play.

Moving on, topic one for this episode. We’ve got core value part six, which is sensory integration should not be neglected. And I think sometimes the whole takeaway here I want you to have is that we rush through the process of sensory integration onto academics before kids are physically ready for it.

And slowing that down would actually help them learn the academic stuff more efficiently when they were physiologically ready for that. So sensory integration should not be neglected. And we do neglect it when we prevent rough and tumble play, when we don’t provide enough time for kids to run and jump and twist and spin and move their body in interesting and complex ways.

We are neglecting their sensory integration. Human children have never been more sedentary than they are right now in 2025. And it’s a problem.

It impacts their development. And so early learning programs should be looking for more opportunities, more ways to put kids into motion so that their eight primary sensory systems, which we’ll get to in a bit, have a chance to wire to the brain. The sensory systems are the only way their little brains can connect with information.

The only way the brain gets information is through those systems. And if those systems aren’t fully wired and integrated and automated, it’s hard for their little brains to collect the information they need to survive and thrive in the world. Kids are driven to wire these systems.

And the way they do it is by moving and touching and interacting and engaging. And so the more sedentary you’re asking kids to be in your early learning setting, the more you’re actually slowing this sensory integration. The more you’re doing to prevent a lot of the up and active, hands-on, engaging, messy activities kids like to engage in, the more you’re doing to hinder the wiring of these systems.

And the more you do to support a child-led, hands-on, play-based, exploratory, focused environment, the more you’re doing to support it. Early learning programs often rush to the academics. We start worrying about the ABCs and we worry about the one, two, threes when what we should really be thinking about is, is this kid running and twisting and hanging upside down enough with three and four and five and six and even seven and eight-year-olds? The academics will be a lot easier when their brains are fully connected to their sensory systems and all of those systems are integrated together.

But we often rush past that because, I don’t know, we don’t maybe value the physicality as much as we should. We need to address sensory issues and needs before academic expectations. And that’s really kind of a takeaway from here.

Focus on the sensory integration before the ABCs and the one, two, threes and knowing your colors and all those academic things. And future episodes will dig deeper into this. As a related note, learning difficulties often start with missensory milestones.

So when kids don’t have that sensory integration happening, there can be those learning difficulties with the academic stuff. And we have kids being pulled out of class for pediatric occupational therapy, which is basically an opportunity in a lot of ways to help kids get those sensory systems wired the way they’re supposed to be. And we can kind of prevent the need for those interventions if we give the kids the physical experiences they need in the early years.

And neglecting those sensory integration activities may cause behavioral challenges. Some of those kids you find troublesome to work with, the challenging kids, that kid in your classroom, that kid that can’t sit still, that kid who can’t keep themselves for themselves, hands to themselves, that kid who seems to be a bull in a china shop. Often those kids are just lacking the sensory integration.

And maybe they become behavior problems because they are trying to engage in the activities their bodies know they need to wear those sensory systems, the running and the jumping and the climbing and the touching. And those things, when you’re not focused on those things, can often be distractions that get labeled as behavior problems. But if we focus, if we pull back and we look at those behaviors as invitations for sensory engagement, maybe we can approach those kids a little bit differently.

Topic two related, the eight sensory systems. So I think we’ll end up doing maybe episodes on each of these eventually, but I wanted to go through them kind of quickly. There’s the five that we all got introduced to in elementary school, and there’s three others we maybe don’t pay attention to enough.

And you may not even be aware of them. I was well into my early learning career before I was fully aware of them myself. So let’s go through these.

So the tactile sense, the system, the sense of touch. We need to touch things. The visual system, the system that we use with our eyeballs.

Again, the sense of touch, the visual system are probably the ones we use most to navigate the world, along with our auditory system, the sense of hearing. The olfactory system, the sense of smell. The gustatory system, the sense of taste.

So that’s kind of fun to say, gustatory, gustatory. Good word to teach four-year-olds, right? The vestibular system. So this is all about our sense of balance, and it kind of lives in our inner ear.

And so all that moving I was talking about earlier to build the vestibular system, kids need to do things like rotate. They need to spin in circles. They need to invert themselves.

They need to go upside down. They need to cross their midline, those kind of things. This is things, kids are wired for these activities in part because it helps wire the system.

But often we shut down the activities that build this system. We don’t want them twisting themselves up in the swing and then letting themselves unwind, for example. We don’t want them hanging upside down because we think it’s too dangerous.

But their bodies need this. Related to the proprioceptive system is about our awareness of where our body is in space, especially in relation to other parts of our body. And it also deals with things like our grip strength, how much pressure we use when we grab something.

You want to use different amount of pressure when you’re holding a kitten compared to carrying a heavy bucket of sand across the playground. And that system is wired by being up and active, engaged, engaging in what’s called heavy work, which we’ll dig into in greater depth in a future episode. And then finally, I think this is my favorite, the interoceptive system.

This is all the senses that go on inside our body. So we are aware of our breathing. We’re aware of our heartbeat.

We’re aware of how our tummy feels. There’s a lot of sensory information going around around the belly button. A uncomfortable feeling in the belly button area.

It might mean you’re hungry. It might mean you need to poop. It might mean you need to pee.

It might mean you’re feeling anxious. And it might mean you’re getting sick. So there’s like at least five different things that are going around internally around that belly button area and learning how to differentiate between them.

Takes a lot of experience. And I would argue one of the most important things about being school ready is being able to differentiate between those things. Because kindergarten teachers like it when kids know when they need to go to the bathroom and know when they’re feeling sick and can articulate those things.

And again, the way we wire all eight of those systems is to be up and active and moving and engaged in the world. More on those in future episodes and links to other resources on the Playvolution HQ site in the episode notes. Topic three, this goes back to what we talked about.

I think in the first episode talked about the value of playful aggression. And I put together just since I made that episode, this handout. There should be a link in the show notes.

It’s called the six critical aspects that clearly distinguish playful aggression from violence. And so really quickly, the aspect intent. Playful aggression, the intent is fun.

Physical activity, a social interaction. The intent of violence is deliberate intent to cause physical or emotional harm. Consent is a big part here.

Playful aggression, consent is kids are engaged in it willingly. They’re choosing to participate. If it’s a violent act, there’s lack of mutual consent or agreement.

Emotional tone. In playful aggression, there’s laughter and excitement and positive emotions. In a violent act, there’s fear and anger and anxiety.

Power dynamic, that aspect in a playful aggression that’s balanced. The whole goal of rough and tumble play is to balance things out so that the play can move forward. In a violent activity, the power dynamic is much different.

It’s imbalanced. One individual or multiple individuals, I guess, exert dominance over others. Physical contact.

In playful aggression, physical contact is controlled. Actions are measured to avoid real harm. The tougher kid, the stronger kid holds back.

We don’t grab or punch as hard as we could because we’re not intending to cause injury. Physical contact in violence is uncontrolled. Actions are forceful, often leading to injury.

The resolution in playful aggression. The play ends with no lingering negative feelings. Relationships remain intact.

We’re still friends. The result of a violent act can result in resentment and fear and damaged, maybe broken relationships. And paying attention to the differences between playful aggression and real violence makes it a little bit easier to support the playful aggression.

Those activities, the rough and tumble play and the chasing and the horse play and that kind of stuff. But also part of our job when we’re supporting that type of play is noticing the shift because sometimes playful aggression with kids who are inexperienced players can drift towards violence. So if a kid punches somebody or grabs somebody a little bit harder than they’re expecting, the person getting grabbed or punched might react angrily.

And that’s one of those opportunities where the playful aggression could turn violent. And so part of our job is watching the faces of the kids, the body language, the language they’re using to see if there is some of that drift from playful aggression into real violence and being there as a tool, a resource to support kids and keeping the play playful. So that handout is, I think, a valuable and useful resource for anybody interested in this topic.

And again, link to it in the episode notes. Moving on, our wrap up for this episode, check out the podcast archives. So there’s this podcast, the Playvolution HQ podcast.

On the Playvolution HQ site, I’ve got 1200 episodes of the Child Care Bar and Grill podcast, a show I did with Lisa Murphy and a bunch of others over the course of 12 years. There’s a podcast I did with author Heather Shoemaker for a couple of years. There’s some episodes of a show I did with Angela Hanscom, pediatric occupational therapist and author of the wonderful book, Balanced and Barefoot.

There’s a show that early learning, kind of one of my mentors, Dan Hodgins, did for a while. And there’s a bunch of other shows I produced over the years. So there’s hundreds, literally hundreds of hours of podcasts in the archives there at the Playvolution HQ site.

So check those out if you need more podcasts to stick in your ear holes. Our Amazon idea for this week, you can click through my Amazon link on the episode notes if you want to support the site and the podcast. Somebody bought these great boxes, 12 by 6 by 6 core graded boxes.

What was it? 25 of them for about a dollar a box. I don’t know what this person bought these for, but I thought they would make ideal DIY blocks. So you take these and you stuff them.

Well, back in the old days, we’d stuff them with crumpled up newspaper, but I don’t know how many people get newspapers anymore. What I’ve moved to is you collect the plastic shopping bags you get at the grocery store if you’re in a state that still has those, or you save packing material from your Amazon orders or whatever and stuff them in these boxes. That makes them a little bit more resilient.

And then you use some box tape and tape them shut, let the kids decorate them, and you’ve got a great collection of large boxes. 25 of these boxes made into blocks would be a great start to a big block collection in an early learning setting. So you might want to think about something like that.

Again, share stuff if you like it. That’s the way the Playvolution HQ site and this podcast grow. I appreciate you doing so.

Next week, we’re going to talk about the fact that humans are in motion learners. Something that we’re going to build on from this episode and something I mentioned earlier. We learn by moving.

Dad joke of the week as we wrap up. Why do bees have sticky hair? They use honeycombs. Honeycombs.

I hope I’m not the only one that enjoys the dad joke. Thanks for listening. Back soon, bye-bye.

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In PHQP 0005 Relationships Are Foundational, Jeff highlights the critical role of relationships in early learning environments. Discussing caregiver burnout, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and strategies for building strong emotional connections—even with challenging kids—Jeff explains why secure relationships are more important than ABCs and 123s. Plus, he shares a fun DIY project for creating paintbrushes, advocates for caregiver self-care, and wraps up with a Dad Joke of the Week that will make you smile (or groan).

Watch Now: PHQP_0005 Relationships Are Foundational

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for pushing play. I’m Jeff Johnson on with the show.

So, um, an astute viewer was wondering about my shirt and every episode so far I’ve been wearing a black t-shirt. That’s because I mostly wear black t-shirts or white t-shirts and uh, actually for the podcast I was gonna wear my black t-shirts. It’s not, it may be the same black t-shirt for every episode.

I don’t really keep track of them. I’ve just got a stack of black t-shirts, probably a different black t-shirt, although there might be some black t-shirt overlap, but I just usually buy a bunch of the same black t-shirts and then I wear them until they are worn out and then get some new, some new black t-shirts. This makes life a lot easier, wear the same thing all the time.

Um, moving, moving on from that important bit of information, topic one, core value part five, relationships are foundational. They’re the core of what’s going on in early learning programs and I think a lot of times caregivers feel pressured and pushed to not focus on relationships because there is such a push towards early academics and school readiness that sometimes we are pushed towards attending to those things more than we do the one-on-one here and now interactions with kids and that’s a problem because we are, we are social animals. We need physical contact.

We need to feel safe and comfortable and valued and appreciated and loved by the people around us and in a lot of early learning programs when staff are feeling pressured to keep up with paperwork and checklists and learning outcomes and school readiness activities and STEM and being rigid, um, learning environments and all of this, we, we forget about the soft, cuddly aspects of, of this work with young human beings.

The social side of things, the relationship side of things are more important than the ABCs and one-two-threes and, and look, last episode, we talked about learning risks and how those are important. It is very, very difficult for a young child to put them out, put themselves out there and take a physical or social or emotional or intellectual risk if they don’t feel a foundational sense of security and, and comfort in their environments and so building strong emotional environments is the basis for all the ABCs and one-two-threes that come after it, but sometimes we flip-flop this.

We focus on the ABCs and one-two-threes first instead of on, on building and maintaining those relationships. Building relationships saps emotional resources. It’s a big cause of burnout in this profession.

There’s not a lot of research done on this. Best numbers I’ve been able to find and, and these are old is that 30 to 40 percent of caregivers leave this work annually because of burnout-related, um, issues and that, that, the, that emotional giving they do all day long is part of that burnout because caregivers are wonderful at tuning into the needs of others but fall short a lot of times in meeting their own needs and if you don’t recharge yourself, you, you don’t come in prepared for that here and now interaction that we talked about in an earlier episode. I think it was episode three.

Uh, caregiver self-care is vital and usually lacking is a one-sentence takeaway if you’re looking for that when it comes to relationships. Risk-taking, like I said, is easier when you feel safe, secure, and valued, putting yourself out there and so it’s really, it’s really vital that we as professional caregivers focus on those emotional relationships we have with kids, um, and we got to do this even, even toward the kids we don’t like and I don’t know.

Maybe it’s sacrilegious or something for me to say this but, and, and, and because, I mean, caregivers are supposed to like all the kids and love all the kids and all that but, but look, let’s face it, sometimes there are kids in your program that are hard to like because temperamentally, um, you may not click with them because you find them extra challenging because you find them maybe a lot like you and you see yourself in them and that causes conflict a lot of times. Even with those kids, we need to work on building strong, solid, deep relationships.

Topic two, related, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. So this is a handout I’ve got over at the Playvolution HQ site, um, it’s been up there for a couple, two or three years since I did the last revision, it’ll be in the episode notes, um, so Maslow’s Hierarchy, that emotional stuff that I’m talking about is really the, the basic needs part of Maslow in a lot of, a lot of ways. The relationship building is really, um, helping make sure that they’ve got all the things they need for their existence.

They’ve got full bellies and that they’re well rested but also that, um, their body is secure and they have security in their resources and security of health, um, and it’s just about, about helping kids build this emotional foundation where they, they feel kind of, they feel free to be themselves and move on to those, those upper echelons of, of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

The belongingness and love needs, friendship, family, intimacy, all of that, those bottom three tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy are all about relationships in, in early learning settings and so, uh, you can check out that handout if you’re, you’re looking for more information along those lines. Moving on, topic three, uh, something totally unrelated, topic three is DIY epoxy paintbrushes and so, look, here’s a, oh, I got blurry if you’re watching the video.

So, here’s an example of that. This is a DIY, uh, two-pronged paintbrush I made. Those bristles are held in there with epoxy.

That’s what this stuff is and I recorded a video earlier explaining how to put these together and we’re going to go to that video now. Hey, Jeff Johnson here with another DIY video for you. This is the third in a series of DIY paintbrush videos.

The whole thing about making DIY paintbrushes is combining the handle and the bristles together and, uh, this time we’re going to be using epoxy to do that and you can do things like this. So, that’s just made up with some little hunks of nylon rope and this is some string in there. You can see it starting to fray at the edges and this is a more dainty one that’s embroidery floss on the end and this guy’s got actually some broom bristles that work out pretty nice.

You can see they’re really in there good. This is a variation on the rope I showed you earlier. This is just some strings and I’ve cut it so it’s going to fray and that’ll be kind of different as it gets used and then just another one with, uh, with broom bristles in it and so the whole thing here is, uh, you’re taking a hunk of wood and you can use a real wooden branch or a wooden dowel.

You’re going to put a hole in the end of it and you’re going to use the epoxy to hook in your bristles. Let’s go to the screen here and show you how to do that. So, first you got to take your branch.

I got a little bit of a curved one here. You can see it’s got that hole in it that’s a one half inch hole in about a one inch, one and a quarter inch piece of branch. You want to be careful when you’re drilling these.

I’m not doing it here in the video just because I’m trying to keep these short but you want to make sure you’ve got that branch really well clamped and secured when you’re drilling into the end of it. That’s something you don’t want to let kids do and then we’re going to be attaching the bristles which are these guys here. I just took some fabric.

I used some masking tape to hold it together there and what you want to do is you want to end up with a bunch of bristles, whatever you decide to use, that fits snugly into the hole you make and you want your hole to be an inch, inch and a quarter deep. Now to the epoxy, you want two-part clear epoxy and there’s a lot of good stuff out there. Now you want to make it simple.

You can see this guy has got the two little nozzles and to use this stuff you take this little thing off the end and you squeeze it down and then you use something like a little hunk of matchstick to stir it together to mix it up together and then you glop that into wherever you’re going to use it and it’s messy. What you want to do is you want to use an epoxy that has one of these self mixers and so you take off the little end cap, you put the little mixer on.

You can see the little swizzles in there as the epoxy, the two parts come out of the tube here as they’re going to mix and then when they reach the end they’re ready to apply and with this you just squeeze that end, you squeeze it down into the hole you’ve made, back off the plunger a little bit and then you take your bristles and you put them in there with a little bit of a twist to get a good glop of connection in there and you wait about 10 minutes and you’re going to have a well secured connection there.

You can see I used cardboard on my tabletop because this stuff is messy. With one tube of epoxy here you can make between five and ten maybe more bristles or brushes and they will be very, very durable. This is of the three videos I’ve done so far, the epoxy is the most durable paintbrush that you’re going to get.

A little bit messier but well worth it if you’re looking for something that’s going to be long lasting. Okay, back from the DIY epoxy paintbrush video. I hope you found that, oh just inspirational and life-changing is how I hope you found it, but give it a try.

They’re really fun and easy to make and if you do I’d love to see photos of your resulting paintbrushes. Let’s wrap this episode up. First, contact me if you’ve got questions, comments, concerns about the show or resources available at the Playvolution HQ site or trainings available at the Explorations early learning site or if there’s anything I can do to help you along your early learning journey.

I love producing this kind of content but really it’s being helpful in promoting classroom change of practice that supports playful learning is what I’m really into. So, reach out if there’s anything I can do to be of help. Amazon idea of the week, this is one I think shared in one of the DIY videos over the Playvolution HQ site about setting up a hammering station for kids.

So, galvanized one-inch roofing nails. So, these are great. Galvanized means that they’re fairly weather resistant.

So, if you’ve got a hammering station set up outside where there might be rain or dew or maybe even snow, they’re not going to rust as readily. One inch is a good size, maybe one and a quarter, one and a half might be better for little fingers. I like roofing nails because they got that bigger head.

It gives kids a bigger target when they’re hammering and they’re relatively inexpensive, $14 for a pack of 500. That’s pretty decent because it’ll take kids a fair amount of time to pound in 500 nails. And again, using the Amazon link is just a way that you can support this podcast and the Playvolution HQ website if you are so inclined.

Next up, of course, like I say every episode, share it if you like it. If you like the show, share it. If you like the Playvolution HQ content, share it.

If you like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs handout, share it. I’m not on the social media and so the way everything grows is by people stumbling across it or having somebody share it with them. So if you’re feeling in the mood of sharing, I’d really appreciate it.

Next week, we’re going to talk about sensory integration and probably go through the eight sensory systems. Dad joke of the week to wrap things up. And look, if you’re wondering, I’ve got dad jokes collected through episode 70 something in July of 2026.

So we’re not going to run out of dad jokes too soon if you were worried about that happening. What did Elsa do with her balloon? She let it go. This here, this here has been the Playvolution HQ podcast.

Thanks for tuning in. Back soon with another episode. Bye-bye.

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In PHQP 0004 Learning Is Risky, Jeff explores how children must navigate physical, social, emotional, and intellectual risks as part of their development, emphasizing the importance of hazard mitigation over risk elimination in early learning settings. He also digs into the importance of differentiating between Dangers, Hazards, And Risks. Plus, hear about the latest Amazon Idea and, of course, the Dad Joke of the Week!

Watch Now: PHQP_0004 Learning Is Risky

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So I’m out for a walk in the neighborhood after a thunderstorm and a neighborhood kid sees me and starts coming in my direction and he quickly realizes my dog Gigi isn’t with me. And he looks crestfallen because he was really more interested in seeing the dog than me myself. And he asks where she is and I explain to him that she’s at home hiding in the bathtub because she’s worried that thunder might come back and she doesn’t like thunder.

And he explains that he used to be scared of thunder and and then he he’d learned that thunder was just noise and it couldn’t really hurt him and he’s not scared of thunder anymore and we talk a little bit more and then he gets this this look on his face this realization and he says you know what that means I’m braver than a husky dog. And he went off feeling big and powerful. Young children love to feel big and powerful and capable in a world that they don’t often understand and in a world where they often don’t have a lot of opportunities to be powerful.

So that’s kind of a fun little story at least I thought so. Topic one, dangers, hazards, risks, and kittens. I thought we’d spend this episode digging in to risk and related topics.

So we got to deal with some definitions first. One, a danger is something that may cause harm like a kitten. They look all cute and fuzzy and furry but they’ve got those little razor blades in their fingertips and those equally dangerous razor blades in their mouth and they don’t have a lot of control over them yet and they’re still testing them out.

So kittens, although cute, are something that’s potentially dangerous, something that may cause harm. Most everything is something that may cause harm. I might give myself a paper cut with this index card later and bleed out.

It could happen. A hazard is a danger not easily seen or predicted. And again, like that kitten, those teeth and claws, especially if you’ve never met a kitten before, are hazards.

They’re dangers that are not easily seen or predicted if you aren’t aware of them. Thirdly, a risk is something you can observe, evaluate, and choose. You can observe, evaluate a kitten, for example, and decide if you want to pick it up, if you want to engage in it.

And in early learning settings, I think we often conflate these three terms, risk, hazard, and danger. And I think it really helps in keeping programs safe for kids when we break them up and clarifies those distinctions. We’ll get into more of this in a bit and this is going to be a recurring topic on the show.

One other thing about this is that mitigating those hazards is one of the big jobs of us keeping kids safe in early learning settings. So making kids aware of the teeth and claws of kittens, making sure we’re maybe wearing long-sleeve sweatshirts when we interact with a kitten for the first time in case the claws and teeth do come out, and just granting that awareness that this thing could cause you harm. It’s not the risk-taking that where children get injured in programs, it’s the lack of hazard mitigation.

And so we should really think of ourselves as hazard mitigators when we’re creating programs for early learning. Topic two, related, four types of risk. Now we often think about risk and we think about physical risk.

Climbing trees is risky. Rough and tumble play is risky. But really there are four types of risk and I want to break them down a little bit.

One, physical risk. Risk with the body. And that’s the one we generally think of when we think about taking risk as we’re climbing trees and we’re jumping off of rocks and we’re doing all those things that may cause bumps, bruises, scratches, and scrapes.

So physical risk is something we’re pretty aware of. There’s also social risk, risk with people. And all of these four are really closely intertwined because a lot of times kids will take that physical risk, risk with the body, because they’re more comfortable taking the physical risk than they are dealing with the social risk of not doing it.

So say you’re four and you’ve got five-year-old friends and they’re jumping off the picnic table and they’re leaping really far and you might be scared, apprehensive of doing that. And so you’ve got two things going on there. You’re scared of physically hurting yourself if you make the leap, but you’re also scared your slightly older buddies are going to tease you if you don’t.

And so a lot of times kids have to balance these things out when they’re taking risks. Next up is emotional risk, risk with feelings. And of course, risk with people, social risks, and risk with feelings, emotional risks are very closely intertwined because our feelings are often very closely tied to our interactions with other people.

And finally, the fourth type of risk is intellectual risk, risk with ideas. You see this a lot of times with maybe elementary school kids and even older kids and adults where we kind of sometimes fear putting ourselves out there with new ideas and sharing thoughts because we are worried about how those are going to be received by the people we’re talking with. There are a lot of third and fourth graders, for example, who don’t want to raise their hand in class because they’re worried they might have the wrong answer and then everybody’s going to look at them.

And so that’s kind of a risk with ideas. But again, closely tied, there’s a social risk there, there’s the emotional risk. And so one of the things we can do on our early learning programs is think about these four types of risk taking because when we just dwell on the physical risk taking and supporting that, we often leave some kids out.

There are often quiet kids in the classroom who maybe don’t like to, don’t feel comfortable speaking up very often and because they are really anxious about taking social risks or emotional risks or intellectual risks. And so we need to find ways to support all four types of risk taking in our early learning settings. Topic three brings us to the core value we’re going to get into in this episode and it kind of all builds up, builds on what we’ve been talking about so far.

Learning is risky and that’s why I wanted to go through those definitions of danger, hazard, and risk and give you those four types of risk before we got to this. Learning involves risk taking. Learning is an active process and because of that, there’s going to be one of those four types of risks involved in all learning.

Probably multiple types of those four types, multiples of those four types of risks in all active learning processes. Learning solidifies when understanding is demonstrated and feedback received. So that demonstration of understanding is often where a lot of that risk goes on.

The social risk and the emotional risk are probably often wrapped up in demonstrating and solidifying what we’ve learned and receiving that feedback. We worry about what other people think about us and sometimes we put off taking risks because we are anxious about how people are going to react to them and so this is something we need to support children in doing. Learning involves actively constructing knowledge by connecting new information to prior understanding and that constructing and connecting involves a lot of risk taking as well.

We’ve got to put ourselves out there emotionally and socially and intellectually and often physically for that learning to take place. Learning isn’t just a static thing you can do without some activity, without some risk taking. And now there are going to be people who will say, well, Jeff, you can just absorb facts.

Somebody can tell you a date that’s important in history or how the color purple is made and you know that information. But I would argue that absorbing random facts may expand knowledge, but it doesn’t become learning until the information is used in a meaningful way, until we do something with what we’ve been taught. So that just absorbing information isn’t really learning and the using of that information, they put it into action is where the learning is solidified and that again is going to have one of those four types of risk involved in it.

And this all comes back to mitigating hazards. Mitigating hazards promotes safety. So if we want to create an environment where it’s safe for kids to take physical risks, we need to focus on making sure there isn’t broken glass at the bottom of the slide and that there’s a resilient surface underneath the tree we let the kids climb and those kind of things.

If we want to make sure that kids are comfortable taking social and emotional risks, we need to think about how we support kids in their interactions with people and how we support them in giving or revoking consent for different types of play and those kind of things. So our job should be really be revolved around hazard mitigation to keep everybody safe, not only physically safe, but socially and emotionally safe as well. Supporting risk supports learning.

Supporting risk promotes learning. And so our job in early learning settings should be figuring out how in this playful environment do we support kids in taking those four types of risk. So wrap up for this episode.

I want you to check out the Playvolution HQ site for related handouts. I’ve got a bunch of them out there related to risks and of course they will be in the episode notes for this year episodes. Amazon Idea.

I really, since the show’s premiered, there’s been an uptick in people clicking through to the Amazon link and using that when they shop Amazon. I appreciate that. Here’s one.

Somebody bought this great set of 12 colored masking tape for kids art craft projects, that kind of stuff. Under seven bucks for 12 rolls of masking tape. That’s a pretty good deal.

Lots of bright colors in there. Lots of fun. Lots of STEM exploration and creativity that can go on with that kind of stuff.

And look, clicking through to that Amazon link. It’s in the episode notes. Help support the show in the Playvolution HQ site.

And I really, really appreciate that. Share it. Share the show.

Share the site if you like it. Share the links in the show notes if you like them. If there’s anything of value there for you.

Next week, relationships. Often, a lot of risk involved in relationships. You got to put yourself out there socially and emotionally.

So let’s kind of build on what we’ve got into in this episode. And finally, dad joke of the week. Ready for this? Here we go.

What’s blue and doesn’t weigh much? A light blue. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for listening.

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Defining Loose Parts takes center stage in this Playvolution HQ Podcast episode. Jeff breaks down Simon Nicholson’s Theory of Loose Parts, highlighting how versatile materials inspire creativity, exploration, and open-ended play. He also examines why educational toys often fall short and shares why loose parts are a better investment for play-rich environments. And, in a random twist, Jeff reflects on his recent deep dive into bagpipe music.

Watch Now: PHQP_0003 Defining Loose Parts

Welcome to Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for pushing play. I’m Jeff Johnson.

On with the show. First up, bagpipes. I’ve been listening to a lot of bagpipe music lately.

I didn’t know where there are so many bagpipe tunes and playlists and artists on Spotify, but I’ve been digging into them. I guess get a hold of me if you wanna, if you’re a big bagpipe music fan and have somebody you wanna recommend, get a hold of me, let me know what you think. I’ve listened to more bagpipe music in the last couple of weeks than I have in my entire life, for what it’s worth.

Probably not much. First, topic one, our continuing series of core value. So core value, part three, is that play environments are not enhanced by educational toys, educational toys.

So what I’m talking about when I say educational toys, I’m talking about things like this and this. These things are lacking in a truly play environment, and we buy them with good intentions, but they really don’t measure up to other things that we could be providing kids. First off, they have fixed functionality.

It’s very limited. They have a very limited scope of what they can do. This thing, you read through the little picture book and you push the buttons and you flip the things around and you put the little shapes in the right holes and you spin the dial, and then you’re pretty much done with it.

Kids get bored with this stuff very quickly because it’s very limited in its functionality. Also, the focus of these products is on outcome over process. They want you to learn letters or learn colors or learn numbers or whatever it is, and that’s their main focus, and that is baked into them to the extent that these products have very, it’s very hard for a child to use them in a different way because they are so locked in to that function.

And we, in a play-based environment, play-thinking people, are more often, not more often, just about always more focused on the process over the finished product, the outcome. It’s the doing of the thing where the learning is, and educational toys don’t measure up to that mark. And then finally, there are poor investment of resources.

For the 20, 30, 40, 50, $150, you’re gonna spend on some learning toys for your early learning environment. You could buy more paint and more construction paper and things like that, more consumable supplies. You could build a bigger collection of loose parts, which we’ll get into in a moment.

And so, really, the payoff for those kind of things isn’t, I mean, it’s just not there. And so, parents might like to see them. You might think these things are a good thing to have in your program, but they really are lacking for those three primary reasons when it comes to early learning.

On to topic two, defining loose parts. Now, this is a big thing where loose parts are gonna come up a lot on this show, but I wanted to start out with a very, well, the definition of what a loose part is in an early episode here, so we’ve got a foundation to build on with future episodes. So, when it comes to defining loose parts, a couple things you should know.

One is, Simon Nicholson is really the go-to guy here. Now, the term loose parts was around before Simon, but he kind of brought it to the forefront and his work kind of opened up the idea to early learning. Actually, quite long after he passed away and after his original work, loose parts have been kind of an early learning term for 15, 20, 25 years now, but before that, it wasn’t a buzzword kind of the way it is now.

So, Nicholson wrote an article in 1971. It’s about a five-page article in, what was it? Landscape Architecture or Architectural Landscape. It was an architecture magazine, and the article is called How Not to Cheat Children, The Theory of Loose Parts.

And like I said, it’s about a five-page article. There’s a link to it, of course, in the episode notes. And then, a few years later, later on in the 70s, another version of this article came out called The Theory of Loose Parts, and this is kind of a expanded version of it which was geared more towards educators, and that version of the article is also available on the episode notes.

But the thing is, those very short articles summed the definition of loose parts up into one sentence, and that’s this, 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. So what Nicholson is really saying there is that loose parts are variables in an environment which can be interacted with. And the degree and inventiveness and creativity that comes from those are proportional to the kinds of variables in it.

So we want an environment with lots of variables, lots of things kids can interact with. So this is a loose part, and this is a loose part, and we’ll talk about it later. This is a loose part, and this is a loose part.

Anything that kids can interact with in the environment is technically a loose part. Now, some loose parts are more loose than others. Those educational toys I mentioned earlier are technically loose parts.

There’s variables that can be put in an environment that kids can interact with. But the problem with them is that they are not as loose as, say, a cardboard box, because they have that limited functionality. Because there’s so much adult outcome attempted to be designed into them that there isn’t a whole lot of flexibility for the way kids use them.

Now, kids, creative kids, kids who have lots of experience as players and creative thinkers can figure out different ways to use those things. The little thing with the keyboard on it might become the launch control for a spaceship or something like that. So those things can be used in variable ways, but because there’s so much planning that goes into them ahead of time, they really do lose a lot of the potential there.

Just about everything is a loose part, and not all loose parts are as loose as other loose parts. And sometimes adults go to great effort to make loose parts less loose. For example, if you have one right way to go down the slide on your playground, that slide isn’t as big a loose part as it would be if you let kids use the slide as they see fit.

So there’s a lot discussed here when it comes to loose parts. We will come back to that, to it over and over again. But I wanted to get you this basic definition.

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. That’s Simon Nicholson’s definition of loose parts. And in the future, we will build from there.

Next up, topic three. Eight eye-opening reasons young children are messy. So this is based on an article I put together at the Playvolution HQ site.

Again, link in the episode notes. And this, I wanted to have this in this episode because the thing is, if you really kind of start embracing loose parts, there’s a chance the program space is going to get messier because kids are being creative and they’re doing things with materials and they’re using their own ideas and they’re being inventive. And that can lead to a mess for kind of these eight reasons.

And look, adults tend to shy away from messy because kids aren’t so great at helping clean up. And we have limited time. And so we figure if we don’t get messy, then we don’t have to clean up the mess.

And life is a little bit easier. And I totally get that. I’ve had that framing of this myself.

But when you look at these reasons kids do, the kids are messy, you can kind of see there’s a reason for it. So we’ll jump into this introductory sentence. Young children are messy and you should find a way to embrace it.

And that’s really the takeaway from this article. Embracing the fact that young children are messy is about understanding their current developmental shortcomings and recognizing the developmental value in their sloppy, disordered, grimy actions. There’s some drill painting, one of my favorite loose parts activities with kids.

We’ll probably talk more about that later. So those eight ideas is one, kids are messy because they enjoy sensory experiences. And because they don’t suffer from the, don’t suffer from, oh, my brain froze for a minute.

They don’t suffer from our adult tendency to be bored with things after we have experienced them a couple hundred times because the world is so fresh and new to them. They really enjoy those sensory experiences. And so they go full body with them.

Look at this little guy having a very deep sensory experience with the slipperiness of purple paint back and forth and back and forth as his hands go on the stuff. They just enjoy the sensory activity. And so they don’t think about the mess.

They don’t think about I’m getting messy because I’m enjoying this mud so much or this finger painting so much. Next up is developing muscle strength and control. So one of the reasons kids are messy is because they don’t have the muscle strength and control to not be messy yet.

They are still developing those strengths and skills. And so the way they develop them is to make a whole bunch of messes until they have the muscle strength and control and good proprioception and vestibular sense and things like that. A good hand-eye coordination, for example.

And then it’s easier to be not messy when you have control of your body, when your body is fully functioning and wired together well. And that just isn’t the case for young children. Next up is the drive to explore.

So kids wanna explore. They’re doers of things. They wanna get out in the world and those hands-on experiences are often messy because kids don’t have the physiological control over their bodies to be not messy while they’re exploring.

There’s another fun one we did. That’s just unrolling bathroom tissue with a vacuum cleaner. Good times.

That was at a play event I did years and years ago. Next one is learning through trial and error. So kids need to do things.

They need to do them over and over again and they need to make mistakes. And of course, those mistakes are gonna get messy at times. So there’s gonna be food all over the floor and walls and their hair and maybe the walls when a young child is, for example, learning to feed themselves.

So trial and error can be messy. They have a limited awareness of cleanliness. If you’re two and somebody’s telling you not to make a mess, you don’t know what the, oh, I’m not gonna cuss in this podcast, you don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.

You don’t know what messy is. That’s kind of a cultural thing that you have to become acclimated to. And so talking to very young children, especially about cleanliness and messes, that’s language they haven’t acquired yet and they don’t have a real deep understanding.

And then look, one person’s expectations of cleanliness and another’s might be two radically different things. Next up is in the moment existence. And all of these other things have kind of referred to this, but kids are right here and right now in the moment.

Like I kind of mentioned, we as caregivers should try to be in the last episode. So they’re gonna be focusing on what they’re doing right now, not the mess that’s gonna be the result of it or the time it’s gonna take to clean it up. Again, they are focused on the process, not the finished product, which is often messy.

And so they’re in the moment existence is really where they’re learning, but it’s also one of the reasons they’re making messes while they’re doing it. Limited impulse control. Some of us don’t grow out of this.

Some of us, it takes a long time, but kids, they do have very limited impulse control. And so they’re gonna try things. They’re gonna suddenly dump buckets of blocks and drop food off of their plate and the high chair and those kinds of things.

So that limited impulse control adds to their messiness. And it’s something until they grow out of it. It’s something they have little control over.

And then building independence. They wanna do it for themselves. And since they don’t have control over their bodies and since their hand-eye coordination and visual tracking and all of these things aren’t very well and they don’t have a lot of experience doing it for themselves can also get kind of messy.

And so those are the eight reasons. I went through them really quick. There’s a whole article there.

You can check out if and you want to. And I just realized that I didn’t, I went through the article without the slides, didn’t transition to the article. Well, we’re gonna live with that.

Look, after 10 episodes, I’ll probably have all my software figured out. So let’s try to get me to where I’m supposed to be here. I’m so flustered.

Topic four, I wanna talk a little bit more about loose parts and variations on a theme. And we’ll make sure we get to the right camera this time. Oh, we gotta go back and actually talk about the thing.

And so when it comes to loose parts, I showed you the little scoopy thing earlier. So I’ve got a collection of little scoopy guys here. And so you might start collecting those as loose parts and maybe they go in the art area and the dramatic play area and the block area and kids start doing with them.

This little sieve thing is kind of awesome as well. I had it laying around so I thought I’d dig it out for this. And look, for just water play, for example, they’re gonna take it and they’re gonna spill.

I made red water so it’d be a little bit easier to see on camera and that’s gonna be delightful. But very simply, you can build variations. So you can see this one, I drilled a, what is that? A 3 1⁄8 inch hole in the bottom of it.

And then when you scoop, everything you scoop drains out the bottom of the container. And that’s a variation. That makes a different loose part than the one that didn’t have the holes in it.

And this one has a bunch of little tiny 1⁄8 inch holes drilled on the sides. And so when you pick that up, the water spills out, but it does so much more slowly. And when the water gets below a hole, it stops draining.

And then if you want it to drain again, you’ve got to kind of tilt it. And so those three scoops saved from wherever with five seconds and a cordless drill, you can create three very distinct loose parts. And that’s kind of one of the values of using open-ended materials like that.

On with the wrap up. First thing, check out the Loose Parts Ideas section of the Playvolution HQ site. If you need Loose Parts Ideas, I add one every week.

There’s a couple hundred of them over there and they’re there just to spark ideas for your own loose parts play. You want to try something new? Try drill painting. Message me if you have questions.

I’ll get to it here on the show in the future with more detail if you need that. Amazon Idea of the Week, we’re going to transition there. Somebody who supports the show by using that Amazon transition bought a bunch of these 12-piece sets of colored masking tape which I think are great loose parts.

You might want to check those out. And anyway, you want to support the show or the podcast or the website, check out that Amazon link. It’s in the episode notes.

And then share the show, share anything on the Playvolution HQ site if you like it. Next week, what’s coming up next week? Risk-taking. I think the whole show is going to be about taking risks.

Dad joke of the week. How does the moon cut his hair? Eclipse it. That’s just good stuff there.

This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back soon. Bye-bye.

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Being “Right Here Right Now” with children is one of the most challenging and impactful things a caregiver can do. In this episode of The Playvolution HQ Podcast, Jeff explores the challenges of staying present while juggling responsibilities and why it’s crucial for fostering meaningful connections with kids. He also critically examines flashcards, offers tips for observing children’s communication skills, and dives into how familiarity bias can cloud our perspective of a child’s world. Plus, stick around for the Dad Joke of the Week!

Watch Now: PHQP_0002 Right Here Right Now

Hey, welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for pushing play. I’m Jeff Johnson.

On with the show. Alright, so first up, I got to make a correction. At the very end of the last episode, I mentioned kind of as we were as the outro music was playing, I mentioned to, I said Jasper, Jasper, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Or something like that.

Now the thing is, I was supposed to say Jeeves because I misspoke and called Jeeves Jasper. Now Jeeves is the PlayvolutionHQ podcast intern. That isn’t his or her real, real name.

We’ll get into more of that in a future episode. He or she wants to be anonymous. Jasper is my coffee shop name.

And Jeeves, kind of my butler when it comes to the podcast and some PlayvolutionHQ stuff. So that means Jeeves often stops and gets my my hot chocolate for me on the way to the studio. And so sometimes I confuse Jeeves and Jasper and it was a big mistake.

And look, Jeeves, I apologize. I’m sorry. I will try never to call you Jasper again.

You’re much appreciated for the hard work you do on the show. So moving on, topic one, core values part two. So last week we talked about how kids need big blocks of uninterrupted time for self-directed play and exploration.

I think the second core value of this show and the PlayvolutionHQ website, and I think early learning, should be that the caregiver’s job is to be right here right now. Present in the moment is what I’m talking about. And that’s really hard to do because life comes at you fast.

You’ve got a lot of responsibilities. People are depending on you. Your mind is all over the place.

So being here and now is a challenge. And it’s what the kids need most. Young children need attentive adults.

The younger the children, the more attentive we should be. We should not be preparing for the next thing on the schedule. And sometimes it seems like as soon as you start a thing with kids, your mind is already on the thing or the thing after that.

And you have a hard time being here and now. We shouldn’t be wondering if Gwen used a tone with us yesterday. Because we replay that stuff in our heads a lot of times.

And we pick nits out of past conversations and experiences. And those things pull us out of the present. We shouldn’t be dreaming of the weekend.

Even if it’s gonna be a great weekend. Even if we really, really need the weekend, we need to be right here right now. But again, our mind pulls us in that direction a lot of the times.

We shouldn’t be fretting about school readiness. It’s not about whether these three-year-olds can do blah blah blah blah blah that makes them school ready. It’s about what can I do for them to make this environment we’re in right now more supportive of where they are developmentally right here and right now.

We shouldn’t be thinking about the paperwork that needs our attention. And it seems like over the last couple decades, there gets to be more and more paperwork. And it is more of an attention grabber from caregivers and pulls them away from being in the moment.

Look, achieving this right here right now experience, 100% of the time, is 100% impossible. It can’t be done. And all of those things I just said we shouldn’t be doing, I’ve done them way more than I should have in my career.

It’s challenging. It’s hard. But the more we can be right here and right now in the present moment with kids, the better off we are.

So a little bit more here and a little bit more now is doable. Maybe we get to 80% instead of 100%. Maybe we get to 85% instead of 100%.

Maybe if you’re at 40% now and you get to 50%, that’s a big change. But start looking for those opportunities to be more here and now in the moment with the kids in your care. Topic two, the five best reasons to ditch flashcards.

I can’t think I teased this in the last episode. We’re gonna go over here. This is a post together I put together for the Playvolution HQ site.

It’s called the five best reasons to ditch flashcards. And we really kind of get into them there. I’m just gonna go through them fairly quickly for you here.

You can check out the article. It will be in the episode links on the show notes. So the five flashcard problems are one, there’s a developmental mismatch.

Flashcards, for example, tend to be relatively stationary and kids tend to be active. And their brains prefer to be up and moving and active. And flashcards are kind of about rote memorization and sedentary activity.

And kids are about handling and being interactive with the world. And look, if you’re gonna learn about the color red, being exposed to red crayons and red Hot Wheel cars and red Play-Doh and red balls and bumping into red out in the world, red apples, red strawberries, they’re gonna learn the color red. You don’t need flashcards to do that.

Flashcards often lack context. The things the flashcards are quizzing kids about don’t always and often don’t line up with children’s developmental levels. They might, knowing what blue is, when they haven’t heard of blue before, because they haven’t experienced blue enough, is kind of taxing on them.

And then you get into letters and numbers with especially really young kids, two and three and four year olds, a lot of time their life experience doesn’t have a lot of context for what the cards are quizzing them about. There’s an overemphasis on academics. Flashcards tend to focus and rush towards academics a little bit.

And in a world where we need to slow down this rush and be right here right now, pushing the formal academic learning is kind of not a best choice for kids. And then they also miss opportunities for holistic development. Kids are active learners and they’re made to be up and moving, engaging.

The learning that results from flashcard drills is limited at best, memorization of basic information. And that’s kind of a missed opportunity when they could be having full body experiences, working on sensory integration and those kind of things. And then also flashcards kind of limit creativity and critical thinking.

You don’t have to, there’s not a lot of critical thinking in flashcarding. There’s a lot of memorization, there’s not a lot of creativity. I think, well, what’s the memory? I think I was quizzed, I had flashcards, there was like a green crayon, and I said crayon, and I was supposed to say green, and I got it wrong.

Because I wasn’t, again, I didn’t have that context, but I was thinking differently than they wanted me to think, because flashcards are very limited in the kind of responses they want. Beyond that, some of the myths about flashcards is, one, there’s a lot of learning involved. There’s not, there’s a lot of maybe memorization, which is kind of very low-level learning.

If you want to get into some more learning, being active and engaged and playful is your best choice. They’re convenient, affordable, and not messy, which is really true, but loose parts are convenient and affordable as well. They are a little bit messy, but the mess is worth the learning.

And the learning is a lot stickier with up and active learning, because the children are engaging their whole bodies and more of their sensory systems than they do with flashcards, and that just makes the information more sticky. And then finally, flashcards help build memory skills. And look, maybe to a point, but so does real play, kids up and being active in the world.

So flashcards really lose out. Now, if I’ve managed to sway you a little bit on flashcards, and you’ve got a stack of them sitting around, don’t throw them away. Turn them into loose parts.

They are delightful for loose parts. Kids can use them in craft activities, you can put them in the dramatic play area, and they’ll use them for restaurant menus and other things like that. They’ll figure out things to do with them that are more creative, and sadly, or no, joyfully, more full of learning than their designed intention.

So that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about ditching flashcards. Back here and on to topic three of this episode, observing communication. This is something else I teased at the end of the last episode.

So let’s go back to the interwebs here. So this is a form I put together a couple months ago for the Playvolution HQ website. It’s a communicative development observation form, and the link will be in the show notes.

Basically, this thing is supposed to help you capture a snapshot of where a child is in their development of communication skills, and it’s pretty simple. We just go here for, this is just a look at it. It prints out a normal office paper.

Basically, you can fill out the top information, date, the name of the child, observed, where you’re doing the observation, and who’s doing the observation, and then anybody else involved in the conversation. And there’s space for a quick recap of the conversation that you observed, and then some questions. Things like who initiated the communication, what verbal interactions were observed, what was the quality of vocal expression, how much eye contact did the child make, things like that.

And there’s just preset selections you can make there. This is kind of a quick way of capturing a fair amount of information. And then next to that are spaces for some reflection.

Things about what kind of gestures and facial expressions were used, strengths in the child’s communication, challenges in the child’s communication that could maybe use improvement, and other notes you might have. And look, doing this weekly for every child in your program might be a challenge. Maybe filling out this kind of observation for everybody in the classroom once every month or two might be interesting.

If you’re a parent of a homeschooling child, starting on something like this when they were an infant and doing it every month or two, while they’re in their early years, and then going back and looking at them, you really will notice the evolution of their communicative skills. And the form is designed to catch body language and facial expressions, which are forms of communication, as well as verbal communication. So it’s useful for even nonverbal kids.

And it’s just a tool out there. There are a bunch of observation forms over at the Playvolution HQ website. There will be a link, of course, in the show notes.

What do we got coming up next? Oh, yeah. So it’s just a snapshot of children’s current abilities and identifying and documenting concerns. That’s the other thing you can use that form for.

If you’ve got concerns about where a child is in their communication development, maybe doing that observation a few times with them will help you maybe catch things you were missing and maybe verify or disprove your concerns about where they are developmentally. Moving on, topic four, our final one for this episode, familiarity bias. This is something I wanted to get into a little bit.

So familiarity bias, my tongue trips over it, is basically, and there’s a post at the Playvolution HQ site, again, a link in the show notes. Familiarity bias is a tendency to overlook, undervalue, or take things we’ve encountered many times for granted. When something becomes part of our daily lives, whether it’s a routine, a space, or a process, it loses its novelty and fades into the background of our awareness.

And look, for us adults, this is kind of a mental shorthand. If you were walking around as a 45-year-old and everything you encountered every day was as brand new as it is to a two-year-old, it would make it kind of hard to get through your day. So this is just something our brain does to speed up our ability to function and devote mental attention to other things.

It can increase our efficiency and reduce mental effort. So it’s good for us adults, but the problem is familiarity bias often clouds our understanding of just how new, amazing, and unpredictable the world can be in the eyes of a child. We get kind of cloudy eyes, and that can be a problem when we’re trying to be right here right now, in the moment with kids, because we do things like overlook newness.

You run into a big, juicy caterpillar on the playground, and you’re like, oh, a caterpillar. I’ve seen a million of them. And this might be the the first time a child has been this close to a caterpillar, and it’s brand new, and fresh, and amazing.

And so we overlook those kind of things. Sunsets maybe aren’t as amazing to us as they used to be, because we’ve seen so many of them. Rushing through moments.

Because we’ve got this shorthand in our brain, things that children are interested in, or that take children more time, or things that children want to hover on, kind of are rushed through sometimes for adults. Things like just putting on their shoes, or picking up toys, or going for a walk with a toddler. A lot of times adults on walks with toddlers, their goal is to get the child through the course of the walk, and move on to the next thing.

The child wants to stop every four steps, and look at something. Pick up a stick, or examine a flower, or listen to a dog bark, or whatever it is. We need to often, when we can, slow down in these moments, and enjoy them a little bit more, instead of rushing through them.

Months and months ago, I saw a dad out walking with a toddler, and it took them about 45 minutes to go about the length of a city block. Because I passed them going one direction, and came back almost an hour later going the other direction, and they just barely made it down the street. And little girl had a bucket with her, and she’s picking things up, and dad is just leisurely checking out the world with her.

And more of those opportunities to not rush the moment, when kids are having experience, would be beneficial. Another thing that familiarity bias blinds us to, maybe, is we under-appreciate the questions kids are asking. Because again, we rush through them.

The why questions. Because look, when you’re young and new to the world, you’re curious about a lot of things, and so you’ve got a lot of questions. And often, because we’ve got things to do, and we’re not being here and now in the moment, we rush past those questions.

Another thing about familiarity bias I want to touch on is the idea of counteracting that bias within us, so we can make more, so we can see more with the eyes, the fresh eyes of a child. One thing we can do is we can pause and observe. Slow down.

Be, again, right here right now, in the moment, like we talked about in topic one. Slowing down, pausing, and observing. Slowing ourselves down.

Just not rushing. Being here, being in the present. Celebrate the repetitions.

One thing that comes from the newness of everything is kids like to repeat things a lot. You’ve probably noticed. And so when they want to read Brown Bear for the sixth time in a row, or when they need to mix the yellow and the blue Play-Doh again, allowing for those things.

A lot of times, we adults, we get busy, and we’re not in the moment, and we want to avoid those repetitions. I mean, often because they’re boring to us, right? And then we need to respect their curiosity. Just kind of enjoy it and go with it for a little bit.

We’re running out of time. I said we’re gonna have short episodes of the show, so let’s get to it. One, check out the Playvolution HQ early learning glossary there.

There’s hundreds of definitions of things like familiarity bias. Next, our Amazon link for this month. You can support the show by shopping my Amazon link, Swinging Pendulums.

It’s a wonderful book. A lot of the things I talk about in this show are gone into in more depth in that amazing, amazing book. We got a transition there, and now we got a transition back here.

Sorry, the slides aren’t moving quite right. And of course, share the show, if you like it, with somebody who you think might like it. I’d appreciate it.

Next week, we’re gonna look at defining loose parts and some other loose parts stuff, as we jump into things. And finally, Dad Joke of the Week. Can a kangaroo jump higher than the tallest building? No.

Buildings, buildings can’t jump. You like, you like that one, Jeeves? Hey, thanks for listening. Back soon with another episode.

Bye-bye.

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Why do kids love playful aggression like roughhousing, pretending to be superheroes, or playing with toy weapons? In The Playvolution HQ Podcast episode, Jeff Johnson dives into playful aggression, explaining why it’s natural, beneficial, and essential for children’s development. Learn how rough-and-tumble play fosters growth across physical, social-emotional, cognitive, adaptive, and communicative domains, and discover practical tips for creating environments that support this type of play. Jeff also introduces a fun DIY project—the “Amazing Rough-and-Tumble Sidekick”—perfect for supporting active, self-directed play at home or in early learning programs.

Watch Now: PHQP_0001 The Benefits of Playful Aggression

Hey, welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

Topic one for this episode: who is this show for? Well, I thought this would be a good thing to clarify here at the beginning of the show, so nobody listens if it might not be for them.

I think the show is first for professional caregivers, people who work on a daily basis with young children. Next up, parents who are interested in play and playful learning and knowing more about those things so that they can understand the play that’s going on at home and be more thoughtful about selecting early learning programs for their children to make sure their kids are getting what they need. And I think also maybe a subset of parents who are homeschooling young children, either preschool or early elementary kids, may also find value in the show.

And then beyond that, anyone interested in how children learn through play, because that’s gonna be one of the big themes here of the show.

Moving on, topic two: core values. I was trying to put together some core values for the show, and the list kept getting longer and longer, so I thought I would spend the first dozen or so episodes introducing those.

So this is part one of what I think the core of this show is, and basically, the core of early learning. Later on, I’ll share some links to a reading list I put together of top 10 books that really get into the research and information behind these core values if you wanna check those out. So first one is young children need large blocks of uninterrupted time for self-directed play and exploration.

I wanted to break that down. So young children. Here at Playvolution HQ, I think young children covers everybody from birth to age 10.

I know some organizations cut it off around age eight. I think that’s a little bit too early. I think that’s kind of leading to some of the age compression that’s going on.

So young children, kids under the age of 10. Large blocks. What are we talking about with large blocks of time? I’m talking hour-plus blocks of time where kids get to be the choosers.

This is a problem in a lot of early learning settings because the day is broke down into little 30 minutes, maybe 25 or 15-minute blocks of time. And so not only don’t kids have an opportunity to go deep into their play, they’re always going through a transition time. So one of the things we’re gonna advocate on this show is big blocks of time and fewer transitions during the day.

Uninterrupted. So what’s that all about? That’s about us adults getting up in their business when they’re playing. Children should be really a lot more free to do their own thing.

So, we need to stop interrupting them so much. And by doing their own thing, I mean self-directed. They should be the rule makers and the problem solvers and the organizers and the material gatherers of their play because that pre-play stuff is all part of the play process.

So all the getting ready, the planning, the organizing, the solving problems that come up in the play that should be owned by the children. That’s self-directed. And then, finally, play and exploration.

There’s not time in this episode to go deep into that, but basically that’s what this show is about. Play, I think the best definition of play is Dr. Peter Gray’s five conditions of play. And we will spend more time on that in future episodes.

And exploration, that’s basically, let’s consider that going out and getting hands-on with the world. Young children are hands-on active learners. They need to engage with the world. They need to touch, feel, and mess with it.

Topic three: the benefits of playful aggression. I think a lot of programs, a lot of parents have some concerns about children acting aggressively.

This is an article I put together on the Playvolution HQ website. It’s called The Benefits of Playful Aggression. There is a link in the episode notes for this episode on this, but basically breaks this topic down.

First up, I wanna talk about the learning that goes on in this play. Playful aggression, we’re talking about rough and tumble play and superhero play and weapons play, covers all five developmental domains of learning when kids are engaging in this kind of play in an environment that’s thoughtfully supported by adults. So there’s physical development, there’s communicative development, there’s social-emotional development, there’s cognitive development, and there’s adaptive development.

That might be a category of learning that you might be unfamiliar with. That pretty much lumps in all of the stuff kids are learning about how to survive and thrive and get along in the world. We’ll be talking about those five things more in future episodes of this show.

And this article, the bulk of it is giving examples of those kinds of learning in aggressive play. But before we get there, I think we need to look at what aggressive play is. And it’s the grappling, pushing, punching, kicking, rough and tumble, superhero, like I mentioned.

And children have a drive for this kind of play. The drive to engage in such play is inborn. Children take part in such play because it benefits their development.

This drive is so strong that kids will do it even if it’s prohibited. They’ll still engage in it, even though they have to suffer consequences. If you’ve got an early learning program and if you have banned rough and tumble play or superhero play or weapons play, it’s going on.

And you probably maybe spend a fair amount of your time trying to stop it. Instead of trying to make these types of play taboo, we need to look for ways to support them and invest time and energy and resources in them. And so there are two reasons I think we tend to shut down playful aggression.

One is that it looks violent. On the surface, it can look violent. And the other is we consider it dangerous.

We worry about the kid’s safety. We worry about parents being upset if a child gets a bump or a scratch or a scrape, those kinds of things. And so first, thinking about that appearance of violence, I think it’s essential to distinguish between playful aggression and violence.

And it’s pretty simple. Violence involves an intent to harm. Playful aggression doesn’t.

Playful aggression is a consensual act. Kids choose to rough-and-tumble, and grapple, and kick, and punch, and wrestle with each other. Their perseverance choose to engage in the activity.

It looks violent, but it isn’t. It can turn violent because somebody might get grabbed or pushed a little bit harder than they like, and then they become violent. And so one of our jobs as supporters of this is mitigating hazards.

We need to be paying attention to the children’s playfaces and putting down tumbling mats and doing those kinds of things. When it comes to mitigating hazards, one of the things I think we need to do is clarify our language. A danger is something that may cause harm.

A hazard is a danger that is not easily seen or predicted. And a risk is an informed choice to do something that may or may not cause harm. And so our primary job in keeping playful aggressive play safe is to mitigate the hazards, to make sure they’re not engaging in rough and tumble play around tables with sharp corners, make sure we’ve got a tumbling mat down, make sure kids understand consent.

And that kids can choose to engage in a play and they can choose to stop. And these kinds of things make it a little bit easier for us to do. And then also wrapping our head around the fact that since kids are hands-on learners, it’s gonna come with some bumps, bruises and scratches and scrapes.

And we should expect those kinds of things as part of the activity. And then the article goes on to cover those developmental domains and go into a couple examples in each one of those domains. So that’s basically what we’re talking about there.

Again, link to that article is in the episode notes. I’ve got show notes, which is basically what you need to know about the show as a whole. Those aren’t gonna change very often. And then episode notes, which will be specific to each episode. So there are plenty of links in the show notes, the topic, you’ll find the links.

So topic four is the amazing rough-and-tumble sidekick. So this is something I put together for those kids who are maybe, maybe they don’t have somebody to rough and tumble play with. Let’s take a look at this. This is something I recorded a while back.

Hey, Jeff Johnson here, Explorations Early Learning. Thanks for pushing play. Today, I’ve got a DIY for you.

The amazing rough-and-tumble sidekick. I named it that because it’s a good playmate for kids who wanna engage in kicking and punching and pushing, either if they’re all alone and don’t have anybody to fight with, or if they are as a group wanting to fight a common enemy, the rough and tumble sidekick is a good choice for that. Thought about calling it the let it outinator because this thing is also good if you have a child who is violently aggressive because they’re emotionally upset.

And it happens sometimes in the early years. The Letitoutinator is a great tool for giving them something to push, hit, and punch instead of actual other people. So it’s a great thing to redirect those angry kids to and help them let it out of their systems so they can find equilibrium again and move on with their day.

But ultimately, you could also call it the milk jug clump because that’s basically what it is. Let’s take a look at the very simple process for putting it together. So you’re gonna want some plastic milk jugs.

They don’t have to be milk jugs, but one-gallon jugs. Ideally, you want more than four and probably less than 30, but the number is totally up to you. You’re gonna want some rope.

If you’re looking at five or six jugs, six foot of rope is probably sufficient. Longer if you are using more jugs. And basically, you’re gonna take your section of rope.

Let me get it untwisted there. You’re gonna fold it over six or eight inches, and then you’re just gonna tie a loop in one end. Before you go stringing your jugs together, you’re also gonna wanna take some glue and glue the lids on the jug.

What that does is it gives the jug some structural integrity. They’re less likely to crumple if the lids are securely attached, and that just helps your milk jug clump live a bit longer. Then, all there really is to it, you’re gonna take that loose end of the rope, and you’re gonna thread that through all of your jug handles.

I’m just using three here because I’ve got limited amount of space. And then you’re gonna pull the rope through until you get a nice, tight clump of jugs. After that, it’s just a matter of hanging them up.

Now, if you’re hanging them inside, you need to make sure you’re attaching them to something secure. A well-anchored hook in the ceiling is a great idea. The blades of the ceiling fan, probably not so good.

Outside, a tree branch, you know, two, three, four inches in diameter or bigger is probably a good idea. Smaller than that, and you might have branch breakage problems. Finally, a couple other thoughts.

One, variations. You can vary the height you hang this at. If you hang it really low to the ground, it’s going to be better for cooking.

If you wanna hang it high, and I’m talking like over children’s heads, you can really use it for letting them whack it with pool noodles or that kind of thing. When you’re just getting started with it, your first use, you probably wanna aim for somewhere between mid-shin and waist level for the three and four-year-olds that are probably gonna be the age group most interested in this thing. Beyond that, I think just remember that the jugs, the clump of jugs, make an alluring target for both playful and angry aggression, two things early learning programs frequently deal with.

That’s all I got for you. Thanks for paying attention. Enjoy your day.

Back to you. Hey, so back to me in real-time. I think this thing, the amazing rough-and-tumble sidekick, is also a useful tool if you’re just tiptoeing into supporting aggressive play.

Maybe you’re not ready to let the kids whack it and wrestle and hit and punch each other. You can hang this thing up and let them battle it. It’s a common enemy, and that might be an entry point into this type of play for you because it reduces the possibility of injuries a little bit.

Okay, so we’re moving on to our wrap-up.

First thing, a top 10 reading list I mentioned earlier. This is something I put together.

Again, there’s a link to it in the episode notes. This is just top 10 books I think really are a foundational set of reading for anybody that wants to dig in to what we’re gonna be talking about in this show more. Free to Learn is number one.

Play by Stuart Brown is there. Balanced and Barefoot by Angel Hanscom, and on and on it goes. And then beyond that, I’ve also got a whole section on the PlayvolutionHQ website.

It’s just playvolutionhq.com slash reading hyphen list that I’ve got 250, just about 250 books listed there, mostly early learning, some about self-care. But you can do a topic search. You can do a search by category.

I’ve kind of divided them up a little bit. And then you can search by author if you want to. So there’s some good stuff there.

Links to both of those pages are in the episode notes if you wanna check those out. Next up, photos and videos. For the Playvolution HQ site and here for the podcast, I’m always looking for photos and short video clips of kids engaged in self-led play exploration and just childhood activities.

If you have those, if you are an owner of the material and you have releases for the kids to be shared and you wanna share them with me, there is a link in the show notes for that kind of stuff. It’ll be always there if you look for it in the future. Next up, Amazon ideas.

One way you can support the podcast and the Playvolution HQ site if you want to, that’s very low effort, is to shop through my Amazon link. If you go to Amazon through that link, I get a little percentage of sales made when people use that link. I get to also see what people are buying, but I don’t know who buys them.

And I thought it might be fun to share some of those things here. One that I think is really great and tool use with kids is something we’ll get into in future episodes is this great child-sized hammer. It weighs eight ounces.

It’s got a durable fiberglass handle. I love the orange coloring on there because that makes it easier to find if it gets mislaid. Used versions of this hammer for years with kids.

And so I think it’s a good go-to option if you’re looking at tool use with kids in your program. Next up, share it if you like it. If you like the podcast, if you like any of the links at PlayvolutionHQ, share them with somebody who might enjoy them as well.

That’s how we keep things growing around here. Next week, we’re gonna be talking about observing communication. I put together a handout, oh no, it’s a observation form, excuse me, that talks about this topic, that covers this topic.

Makes it a little bit easier to see the communication going on in an early learning setting. And that maybe helps you reflect on it and kind of documents the communication that’s happening. And also, we’re gonna talk about flashcards.

I’ve got some thoughts about flashcards. Finally, to wrap things up, Dad Joke of the Week. This is gonna be a weekly thing.

You can always stop listening before we get here if you are anti-dad jokes. I happen to enjoy them. Our inaugural dad joke, how many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh? The answer, of course, is 10.

Tentacles, get it? Tentacles? This has been an Explorations Early Learning Upstairs Studio production. Oh, that wasn’t too bad, was it, Jasper?

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This here is what they call the tease episode for the new Playvolution HQ Podcast. The Playvolution HQ Podcast dives deep into play and early learning, from loose parts and power play to school readiness and curriculum. This weekly, short-format show goes beyond the resources available at playvolutionhq.com, delivering original content like DIY ideas, terminology deep-dives, commentary, news, early learning history, and more. Weekly episodes start on 01/06/2025 and will be available in video and audio formats.

If you like the tease, share it with someone who may enjoy the show.

Watch Now: PHQP_0000 The Tease

Hey, thanks for pushing play. I’m Jeff Johnson. I hosted a podcast called The Child Care Bar and Grill for a long time–12 years, we did 1200 episodes. Now, I’m looking at doing something a little bit different. It’s gonna be called the Playvolution HQ podcast.

It’s named after my Playvolution HQ website, where, for years, I’ve been curating and collecting early learning resources. There’s like a lot of good stuff over there you might wanna check out. This new show is gonna be released in a video format, but I’ll release an audio version, too.

The main focus is gonna be play. That’s my big thing. Along those lines, we’re gonna dig into Playvolution HQ resources I’ve created and take a deeper dive into them.

We’re gonna look at old-time early learning stuff. I’ve been doing a lot of deep dives down rabbit holes along those topics. I’m gonna share some DIY ideas.

We’re gonna look at product reviews, recommendations, and commentary. There’s lots of good and bad stuff out there in the market, and of course, more because who knows where the show is gonna go as it evolves. A little bit of detail: a weekly show, Monday morning releases, and it’s gonna start January 6th.

I hope you think about tuning in and giving it a chance. I’d appreciate it.

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