Episode 184: The Benefits of Play-Based Learning with Rachel Robertson
/The 30 Days of Play Challenge has returned! While I usually run this challenge once annually, I've updated it for flexible access. You can now join whenever convenient for you! Sign up at www.laurafroyen.com/playchallenge.
Regardless, I hope that this week's episode will make playful parenting seem more achievable and enjoyable for you! I am excited to share with you the latest episode of my podcast, where we explore the importance of play in early childhood education. I had the pleasure of interviewing Rachel Robertson who has been in the educational field for over 25 years, has degrees in education, human development and family studies and a Certificate in Early Education Leadership from Harvard and is a doctoral student at Northeastern. Also, she’s the Vice President of Education and Development for Bright Horizons.
Here are some of the topics we covered in this episode:
Reasons behind the significant shift from play to academic focus in early childhood education
Play-based education and why play is important is so important for learning
Factors to consider when selecting an early childhood program or daycare for children's development
Supporting children in early childhood education for parents with limited choices
How to support early childhood teachers
Importance of open-ended play objects and creating a space for children to make a mess for creativity and exploration
Benefits and considerations of early childhood education and socialization
If you're looking to connect with Rachel and learn more about her work, visit her website brighthorizons.com, LinkedIn @brighthorizons, Twitter @brighthorizons, and Rachel’s LinkedIn @rachelrobertson.
May these insights inspire you to embrace the power of play in early childhood education, fostering a journey of discovery and growth for children and families alike.
TRANSCRIPT
Parenting is often lived in the extremes. It's either great joy or chaotic, overwhelmed. In one moment, you're nailing it and the next you're losing your cool. I want to help you find your way to the messy middle, to a place of balance. You see balance is a verb, not a state of being. It is a thing you do. Not a thing you are. It is an action, a process, a series of micro corrections that you make each and every day to keep yourself feeling centered. We are never truly balanced. We are engaged in the process of balancing.
Hello, I'm Dr. Laura Froyen and this is The Balanced Parent Podcast where overwhelmed, stressed out and disconnected parents go to find tools, mindset shifts and practices to help them stop yelling at the people they love and start connecting on a deeper level. All delivered with heaping doses of grace and compassion. Join me in conversations that will help you get clear on your goals and values and start showing up in your parenting, your relationships, your life with openhearted authenticity and balance. Let's go!
Laura: Hello, everybody on this episode of the Balanced Parent Podcast. I'm going to be sitting down with Rachel Robertson to discuss the importance of play in early childhood education. Rachel Robertson has been in the education field for over 25 years and is a well respected thought leader. She has degrees in education, human development and family studies and a Certificate in Early Education Leadership from Harvard and is a doctoral student at Northeastern. She's currently the Vice President of Education and Development for Bright Horizons, which is an early childhood care center with that's has a national presence. So Rachel, welcome to the show. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do? And then we're gonna dive into one of my favorite topics, play and its role in early childhood education.
Rachel: Great. Thank you for that introduction, Laura and thank you for inviting me to be part of this conversation. It's one of my favorite things to talk about. So I'm, I'm happy to be here for, I could talk about it all day or for 30 minutes, whatever we do today. But I think about it, talk about it a lot about play because it is just so important. My background, I'll give you the abbreviated version. I started out working in camping with young children and I thought that was 100% where I was going to spend my career being outside playing experiential learning hands on everything. You're supposed to get muddy. You were supposed to be outside, you're supposed to experiment and try and touch everything except for the poison ivy. Don't touch that. But that was what you were supposed to do. And then I, but I, when I was in undergrad, I, so I did that actually through high school and, and through college I did take a gap year and I worked at a Montessori school with toddlers. So when I went to get my undergrad, I thought, well, let me get a, a minor in child development while I'm doing while I'm pursuing my lifelong camping career here. And when I had my own children and realized living and working at camps 24 hours a day was just not going to be as feasible as I wanted it to be. It wasn't working for me. I thought, well, what could I do?
Okay. I worked in childcare. I liked that. I have my undergrad and child development. Let me just see about child, early, early care and education. I answered an ad in the paper. So that was a while ago and someone thought, okay, let's give her a shot. And I was in a, a, a trainee center director. Within weeks, I remember, I still remember distinctly thinking I'm staying here. This is so important. I thought what I was doing with older kids and camping was the most important thing. And it's very important. That was great work. I'd do it again any day. But I understood pretty immediately once I got into early care and education that this was the most influential time in a child's life. And if I wanted to make a difference in children's lives, it would need it to be in early childhood the way I wanted to do it because of the immense amount of brain development that was happening within this kind of beautiful, joyful, precious childhood.
Like it's play, you're having so much fun, not, it's not always easy, but it's joyful work and you're setting these children up for lifelong thriving. So once I got that, which was pretty immediate, I've said like this is where I'm gonna stay. And I've been in this career 25 years since, since that happened. And the work I've done, I just keep saying yes to things. So I'm lucky to be in this position here. But I've worked, I've written curriculum. I've worked with state systems. I've done a lot with training. I've done a lot with family education. I've written books. I work with military and I just kept do kind of collecting experiences in the field that got me to this place. And I actually specifically chose to come to Bright Horizons because of the commitment to early childhood research and quality and because of the innovation around research and science to make sure that and I wanted to work somewhere that allowed that for me to do that. And again, just do it in this like joyful, playful, filled, not that it's all places of course, like stuff happens, like somebody bites somebody, of course. But, once in a while that happens, but it's just really beautiful, playful work and, and it's childhood, get to be part of so many people's childhood.
Laura: Okay. So I, I love that. I would, I would love to hear a little bit more about what, what play based learning actually is, I think that that is a buzzword. I think it's coming, you know, coming into fashion a little bit more than it was when my, when my kids were little. So my kids are 11 and 8 and when my oldest was move, moving in and we were looking for an early childhood, education or care setting for her. There was a lot of emphasis in educational or academic curriculums. And at the time I was in my PHD program for in Human Development and Family Studies. And I knew I wanted my kid in a play based program because that was the, the gold standard. And yet all of these places we were looking and interviewing were talking about their academic curriculums, which I felt was wildly not appropriate for the age that my child was. She was about 18 months.
And so I, that was really, like, kind of, for me, I, I knew going in, I wanted a play based environment for her but I don't think a lot of parents know going in that that's what they should be wanting or should be looking for. And I think that they don't even know necessarily what that means. And so I guess maybe a better place to start is why do you think there was such a strong shift away from play and into academics? And how do you kind of see the world moving back into play because I do think that that's starting to happen.
Rachel: Yeah, I, I could say so many things. So we, we are fairly competitive society and there's some researchers that I followed and they, there's some theories about how we got into this competitive place just in education overall. So there's a lot of that out there and, and so we're, we're sort of winning trying to run a race around academics and we're not even running the right race, but we, we look at these like external measurements or these top of the pyramid measurements and we're not paying attention to all that's happening underneath. So we get these superficial things like oh, they can do this or they got this score, they passed this test and we fixate on that achievement, but we don't value or understand all that it takes to get to that achievement. So one of the things I often say is if you're rushing development, you're also skipping development. It's not, it's you're making a trade off.
So if you're rushed now, some kids have developmental trajectories go on an order typically. But kids move around. You might develop one thing differently than I do at different paces and rates. But we're all kind of going in the same order. You, you, you crawl before you scoot before you walk. That almost always happens. And that's what most development. So if you skip to the walking because you're so eager to get your child walking that you just kind of like, no, we're not gonna crawl. We're going to skip to walking. They actually missed out on some really important development that happens in that phase. That's underneath the pyramid.
Laura: That provides that strong foundation. Yeah.
Rachel: Exactly. So you, I yeah, that analogy is perfect. So you can go like deck create the house because you want it to look beautiful. But if you didn't spend your time on the foundation, it's not gonna be worth it because they're gonna have that houses challenges. Same with a young child. So you might want them to be able to say all the letters in the alphabet from flashcards, but they're missing a bunch of, they don't even know what those letters stand for. They don't understand that. Letters are symbols for sounds that make up words because you've rushed, you've skipped over the development. So we, we get really fixated on kind of uh faster is better and more is better. And neither one of those things are true for child development or for education. So that's, and the push down.
So we've said, okay, this amazing amount of research is happening and sophisticated. Oh my gosh, we understand early childhood to be so important. The first five years of development are so important, so much is happening. And also we're very competitive and want things to happen faster and more and those things collided and that's what turned into this. I think this like let's make everything academic, let's start them when they're three. Like how about when they're two? They should be studying Mozart by then and they should be getting ready to be math geniuses by them. And the the other thing that we all struggle with is that we don't have any regulation around the term educational. So any anyone can say that their toy or material is educational. So with the influx of information sources, we also all got flooded with that. So all those things were happening at the same time.
There are, there are toy companies that have been sued immensely and lost because they falsified claims about how smart your child was gonna be if they use the product and they're still selling their product because they make that much money off of it. So, all of that at once I think is what got us to this place of like, oh, that nursery school stuff that play stuff that we used to do when we were young. That's just, that's custodial care. That's just care, that's not sophisticated learning. And we just wrongly went to this place of push down more. Everything must separating care and education. And in fact, you can't really separate. If you're gonna have high quality early learning, you can't separate care, play and education, they're all together.
Laura: Yeah, especially for the, the young ones. Okay, I love what you're saying. I feel, you know, I feel so strongly that parents are quite a vulnerable population. They want so desperately for their kids to, to become successful, whatever definition of success you have. And it makes so much sense that if we are seeing products out there that are marketed to kind of give our kids an edge or classes that are supposed to give them a leg up, it makes so much sense that we would go for those things.
Rachel: Absolutely. Every parent wants the best for their child, nobody wants to get it wrong. Right? Like right.
Laura: Right. Yeah.
Rachel: Everybody's coming from that place. And if someone says this is gonna give your child a leg up, of course you're gonna pay attention to it. Of course.
Laura: Of course. Yeah. So one of the things I would love to kind of arm parents who are listening to this episode with is with some education, with some ability to be really aware, conscious consumers of, of some of the the ways that they're marketed to. So let's just break it down to what is the benefit of play for a child when it comes to their early educational experiences? We all know that play is children's language. That's how they process and move through things. But when it comes to education, what is play based education, why would play be a beneficial part of education?
Rachel: Yeah. It's such a good question. So, when you watch children play, I think you can see a lot of what I'm about to say. If you just for a sustained amount of time, just watch them play. That's okay.
Laura: Okay. Can I just interrupt for a second? So, during the month of January, we do this 30 days of play project within my community. The 1st 10 days are solely dedicated to observation with it. It's so your, your only job is to drop into presents and observe your child and play for 10 minutes. But because of that, because you have to observe anyway. Go ahead. Sorry, I didn't.
Rachel: Yeah. No, I love it. That's exactly, because you can see a lot of what we're talking about here when you pay attention to it. A lot of times adults will do something else when play is happening. Like it's always like I can take a break here, the play is happening and.
Laura: Which also is okay.
Rachel: You know, it's definitely okay, but just a couple times, take a moment to pay attention to what is exactly going on. So play is I don't remember who said it and I think it's actually been sort of changed over the years, but play, it is Albert Einstein or someone said it was like you learning laboratory, like every all the experiments like mad scientists play, that's what kids are. Scientists from the get go. They are, why, why, why? That's a good scientist. Questions they're experimenting, they're trying cause and effect what will happen if this happens? What, what's the reaction of this person gonna happen? How does this work? Like they want to know all that stuff and play is really the best way for that to explore all that natural curiosity and wonder they learn about what they're capable of. They learn how things work. They learn scientific processes, they actually learn some pretty sophisticated stuff.
They learn a lot about stem concepts and engineering and balance and geometry and everything you can think of is happening through that play, how to express themselves, how to regulate their behavior. One of the things I say to adults when I'm talking to them in a meeting space is what are you doing right now? What skills are you applying right now and a lot, it takes a minute sometimes to think about it. But it's stuff like I'm waiting my turn, I'm managing my behavior. I'm thinking about what you're saying. Am I connecting it to something else? I'm planning ahead. I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do tonight. If people are honest, what, whatever they say, all of that stuff is foundational executive function, social emotional skills. Those are happening in play. That's what kids are doing when you're, when, when you're playing with another child.
And they say they take the storyline in a different direction, you have to be flexible, you have to be a creative thinker. I'm gonna say kids are in a constant state of improv, they are constantly working on. Well, I don't know what's gonna happen next. Let me find out and that is all happening when we give them space for play. It's such a you can't, you can't fabricate that experience. You can't give them a five step direction activity and have all those things happen at the same time, the way it will when it happens through that natural, even if you and we can talk about this a little bit, even if you prompted or guide that play a little bit. It has to have that open ended. I don't know where this is gonna go bring all your ideas and imagination. There's no wrong answer that has to be included to have it be real play. And when that's happening, there's just nothing else that's as rich and meaningful and powerful as play.
Laura: I love that. Even for, even for adults. I know. Right. I mean, the, the way we play is different. Right? So, play looks very different for adults, but we still need it. You know, humans are an animal that needs play. You know, we are primates, we need play. It's important for us.
Rachel: I think, you know, when we talk about hands on learning or role play, which no adult likes, but they all learn from a lot that's play, that's play when we do like a group project or a creative activity in your brain. Sort of like, oh, I have a little space to think here where you walk away from your computer screen and your brain feels relieved like you're in a state of kind of creative space and play. We all need it. In fact, I've read recently some, some thinking around the fact that some of the mental health stuff that we're dealing with as a society is coming from the greatly reduced amount of play that children and adults experience the last few years.
Laura: Oh, yeah. I mean, I think that that makes a lot of sense because a lot of our free time is so easily solved by the thing in our pocket. You know, our phones, our devices.
Rachel: Our lessons, our class, or keep busy with this or, yeah, we're, we're, we're, we focus a lot on occupying time rather than how we use that time. So, we're thinking, let's just stay busy. I can't, we can't do this. We're getting through this. We're doing this next. And that another good thing about play is it's a perfect antidote to boredom. And boredom is a good thing when kids say I am bored. That's a good thing.
Laura: It is.
Rachel: There's a wide open opportunity for some good imaginative play.
Laura: I mean, I do understand that for the parents, you know, who are at the tail end of a summer vacation with their kids home, hearing mom, I'm bored who we've maybe hear that too much. But you're right, boredom is such a beautiful opportunity for creativity and ingenuity and play. Okay. So when, if I'm putting myself in the shoes of a parent who's looking to get their child into an early childhood education program, preschool daycare, what are some of the things that they should be looking for when they are interviewing or exploring or touring programs and facilities? That would clue them to the fact that play is valued.
Rachel: Yeah, so that, I mean, just flat out asking how, how is play incorporated in your program? If you hear answers like, oh, we have play time from 2 to 2:30 in the afternoon. Anything like that should sound some alarms that there's compartmentalizing play that they're not unconnected, play with learning and care.
Laura: Interesting. Okay.
Rachel: So you want to think for like you don't want someone to be scheduled and you don't want play to be really constructed for a child. So the second there's a right or wrong outcome or there's the moment an adult is directing it, like do this, here's the directions, this is what it should look like at the end. That's not play. That could be something else. Maybe that's learning to follow directions or create a pattern, that's not play. So we, you wanna make sure that there is that rich imaginative play, guided play and not everybody uses that term. But so I'll explain what it means. But guided play is really where the richest learning happens. So where an adult understands their role as a facilitator of learning through. So any of these kind of ways someone might talk about it or it's written in their philosophy, but you could, you should also watch for this. Any high quality early care and education program should allow you to come visit.
Laura: Yes.
Rachel: And see what happens in the classroom. So if you see things like a teacher, children playing in different spaces, not all required to move at once, not having a timer and they have to rotate or anything like that because that takes the, the free play out of it. You want to see a teacher choosing to put themselves with children and prompting their thinking maybe, oh, looks like you could. What about this material? I wonder what would happen if so they're not telling them what to do. But they're prompting thinking or maybe they're adding a vocabulary word or helping children chart their hypotheses about something going to happen or like, oh, that's not fitting in the space anymore. What ideas do you all have? So, helping them problem solve, nurturing their own development through that play. That's guided play. So free play is like the adults not interacting at all.
That's wonderful. That's great. We want lots of that free play. But real rich learning happens from that guided play where a teacher might say, oh, I'm looking at your play. I see that you're making something really tall. I wonder, I wonder if you could also make it really wide. And so they're adding a layer or context or a challenge, but they're not just so looking for that kind of interaction from a teacher. Again, like making sure that a schedule isn't just block chunked up until like here's play time, here's learning time and that that teacher is really celebrating and having fun with the children at their level. Joyful laughing, enjoying the like childhood should look like childhood. It shouldn't look like fun in third grade. Right? It should in third grade, by the way, should be fun too, but.
Laura: I agree.
Rachel: Should look like childhood. It shouldn't look like mini school or another grade that we're trying to get them to. And in fact, if you pay attention to what's happening in schools, they're talking a lot about differentiated instruction and project based learning that's all happening in good early childhood. So what I say is we should be pushing up, not getting pushed down because the beauty of what children experience in high quality early childhood is in fact what children in older grades also need.
Laura: Yeah, I love that. So, just for the listener who's not familiar with the pushing up versus pushing down. So, in, in education it, there's been a trend in the past, what would you say 15, 20 years to push? Yeah, to push skills down. So, you know, when I was growing up I maybe learned letters in kindergarten. But reading, learning happened in first grade. Really, you know, really, like I learned to read in first grade. Now most kids are fully learning to read in kindergarten and they're learning letters in four K. Right. Wouldn't you say that's what we mean by pushing down.
Rachel: Yeah. And I think that's right. So, if you, so if you walked into a toddler room, let's say, and you saw alphabet rugs and alphabet posters that would give me a lot of pause.
Laura: Me, too.
Rachel: Like the first, no one's learning the alphabet from a rug. So that's one thing. Like, it just makes us feel like there's academics happening, but there isn't a richness of academics and it's actually too early. We want them to be building their expressive language, their ability to say how they feel we want them to be learning about receptive language, listening to directions, responding to other people.
Laura: Those foundational executive function, skills, learning to wait and regulate. Yeah.
Rachel: Yeah. And of course, like, so busy doing flashcards about letters, what they're gonna do is they're gonna be able to see, they see that shape of the A and they're gonna start to memorize that. They don't know what that letter does, what it means. So it's, again, it's that rush skip development. The other thing I would say about play, if, when you're looking, if you're going to early care and education program, so ask them about it, look for their philosophy. Um ask the, you know, if you want to get sophisticated about it, you can ask like which theorists do they use to develop their philosophy? What, what's their curriculum based on and ask for examples of the curriculum? Make sure what's on the curriculum kind of matches what you're seeing in the classroom. You want to look for things like can kids do? Are there, is there process art, meaning messy, creative stuff? It's not all looking the same. That means the process is valued.
You wanna look for, maybe there's a, maybe there's a black tower over there in blocks, but no one's there. But that means that kids are allowed to leave their work and come back to it, that they can continue to evolve, that it's not about like everything being neat tidy. It's good that kids learn how to take care of their classroom. But it's not, it's about the richness of the exploration. So if I go in a classroom and see something over on a table and it has like a save sign or it has some kids names on it because they got to save it with their name. That's thrilling to me because that means that project is happening over time and kids get to come back and iterate and be creative and try new things and they're really engaged in it, they want to keep it there. And that means that also that the teacher's main goal isn't to clean up. The teacher's main goal is to help children learn through something they're really interested in.
Laura: I love that. Yeah, I love that.
Rachel: Can I give you one other thing?
Laura: Please, please, please. Yes
Rachel:. I, so if you're looking for it because I mean, academics isn't wrong to learn about, right.
Laura: No, no.
Rachel: If we use reading, children usually develop reading school skills somewhere between five and seven. So we don't need to rush it. If they, if they end up reading early, that's fine. That's a natural development, but we shouldn't push it and force it before it happens. But we can get them ready for again, looking at the trajectory of development. So if you am I in a preschool room, if they're doing worksheets and flashcards about letters, I get concerned about that because that's memorizing, that's repetition. That's didactic, that's not meaningful, playful learning. But if I see that they did a cooking project and the chef came and helped them or their caterer or someone at the grocery, whatever food related thing happened that, that they're then using writing a thank you note as a group and practicing letters together. Then I'm so excited because they.
Laura: Because it's meaningful, yeah.
Rachel: And it was engaging and they're getting much better learning because they're using and practicing their skills in a useful way. None of us in our jobs. I mean, maybe there's a job out there that you have to do this. You have to sit around and recite the alphabet, but that's very foundational. We have to use the alphabet and that's what they, what, like, let's have them do that because they can do that. And that's actually how they'll, they'll learn the foundational skills and the more advanced skills at the same time. So looking for that, you can look for the learning. It doesn't have to be just replay and I actually don't, not just replay but look for the learning embedded in the play, not next to or on the side.
Laura: Yeah. Like things like if there is a kitchen area in the play space making, you know, are there, is there a pad of paper for taking down orders available? You know, like that sort of thing. Okay.
Rachel: That's a great example. I was just in the center I visit centers a lot and I was just in the center where the teacher was in, read a book about something about building. And then all the, a lot of the children, not all of them, but a lot of them are choosing to do some building afterwards. And I sat next to a little girl and I said, tell me about what you're doing. And she said she's telling me that she was building a, a rocket. And I, and then I sat next to her for a little bit and she said to me, can I tell you the most specialist thing I know.? And I was like, of course, you do, please. And she was telling me about this secret passage way. She knew about it at a museum that was near a rocket that she was excited about. And then the teacher came over and was talking and they were going to start doing a rocket project.
They were interested in it asking lots of questions. And the teacher was asking questions like, well, what do you think makes it go? And then they made this big chart about, well, what do we know about rockets? What do we want to know about rockets? So, like, it just stemmed from this very natural interaction. That was fun. And, and that's where the learning went. The teacher found the opportunity within children's interests instead of fabricating, like this month's theme is on apples. I don't think if you're interested in rockets, we're gonna talk about apples. So that's again, something I'm always looking for is like, are the children's interests inspiring this because then it's gonna be really engaging and playful.
Laura: And rich. You know, I'm, I'm thinking about that one for that takes a lot of skill as a teacher. Right? It takes a lot of resources as a teacher too. And I'm, I'm thinking about the privilege associated with being able to be in a care setting. Like the one you just described, like what we've been talking about, there's a huge amount of privilege in there. Now, I know of several, you know, several families whose children are in home care settings who do exactly those things, too. You can find care settings like this at all, entry levels at all price points. But I do wanna just have an eye towards the families who maybe don't have as much choice about where their kids go for their care and what parents can maybe be doing if they're starting to, if they're noticing some of the things that we've been talking about here, maybe aren't happening in their childcare and they want to see them more play based things or if they're seeing some of the things like the alphabet rug, for example, and then, you know, starting them wondering about what they can be doing to support, maybe even, you know, support their individual child, but maybe even the, the care center that they're in. What are some things that parents who maybe don't have as much choice, as much latitude. What can they be doing to support their child and, and hopefully all children because we're all in this together.
Rachel: Yeah. I think. I mean, so the alphabet rug, it's, I, I.
Laura: No, I totally know. Yes.
Rachel: Like, so the alphabet rug it's not gonna hurt anyone but it's.
Laura: Of course not. No, it's just an indication.
Rachel: It's an indication. Yeah. So I would say to families a couple of things, one is a lot of times, early care and education providers are doing some of this academic work because they think that's what families want.
Laura: Exactly. Yes, so good you said that.
Rachel: You simply start to tell them. This is not actually what we want or how can we infuse play more or how can we support the teachers or? And I understand.
Laura: Oh, that is so key Rachel. How can we support the teachers? The teachers do I mean, oh, my gosh, these early childhood teachers, oh, they have the, they have the hardest jobs on this planet and the most important jobs.
Rachel: So hard and so meaningful. And when, when I, if we have this education development department, upright horizons that I lead and when people want, a lot of times people want to join our department and sometimes they've been worked in the center and I always have a pretty frank talk with them about it's gonna be you, you think you're actually gonna miss it a lot because there's no one who hugs you at the end of the day. There's no one who makes you a picture during the day. There's no classroom, you can go in and see all these faces and all this development and celebrate these milestones with family. So it is this but the, but it's a lot of work and it's way immensely undervalued early childhood educators. So there's just this beautiful joy and it's a great career path and it is absolutely a lot of work. It's demanding, you're working with vulnerable population and their families who are also very rightly worried about their care and what's happening with them.
But so, so offering your support versus I don't like what the teachers are doing or why are you doing this or this or that you must not know or whatever kind of phrasing that might accidentally come out just really support this. Is there a workshop we can all do together? Is there a study? And I, and I understand parents don't have time. Parents might not have the money to add to these resources either. But some things like some programs can take donations. So are there some I can help loose parts, natural materials are some of the best things you can have. They are free, you can get really safe, like splinter free sticks, stones, shells, pine cones. Those are wonderful things to have in a classroom. Parts of PVC pipes. Paper towel rolls, empty Kleenex boxes. If I open a cardboard box and there's anything interesting cardboard in there, I'm like, I'm saving this for the next time I go.
Laura: Absolutely.
Rachel: It's, you can get, go to a picture frame store and ask for all their cardboard extra stuff that they just.
Laura: I love that. Yeah.
Rachel: You don't need them so you can help with that. If you're helping out a program, you can also tell them that you value play and you, you're supportive of them exploring that and pursuing that. But you and then you can also supplement at home and the night, the thing I love the most about early childhood is while it is so important and sophisticated and it sets a person up on a trajectory for life. It also isn't, is fairly simple to get it right. There is a lot of ways to get it right. And if you do some of these things at home, you child is also flourishing. So making sure you're reading books, making sure you're having rich conversations that you respect your child as a and this, you want to look for this in the care program too is you respect that child as a partner as an individ that has their own ideas and they have a lot of them, right? They're not there to just be quiet and do what you say. But that you and then you give them, you enrich their vocabulary maybe you say. I, I've actually a children's book author too and I have in my books, I use what I refer to as juicy words. I stole that from a different author, but kind of, you don't shy away from a word like magnificent. You use it and then they learn how they learn how to say it. I've been, I was in a, a class one of our classrooms a couple months ago and a child told was using the word benevolent. I'm like, what, what's happening?
Laura: Love that word.
Rachel: Appropriately too. So, so that kind of thing and that play and offering them take, take, I'm just looking at your background, you can take like little wood and pieces or you can take shower curtain rings or whatever, safe, old corks or what, you know, clean, clean things, safe things always, but just let them play and experiment. This is why children love the paper box, the cardboard box. This is why they gravitate towards the pots and pans because it can be anything. A toy car is.
Laura: Open ended and.
Rachel: Yeah, exactly.
Laura: And they're meaningful objects.
Rachel: Toy car every day. Right? So every single day. A a block can be a toy car can be, it could be whatever it could be a dolphin, a rocket ship. It could be part of something else. Yeah. It's just like you're saying open ended objects. That's really important.
Laura: Yeah. My favorite place to find like loose parts stuff other than out in nature. Is that thrift stores? There's just really like my, my kids favorite continue. So they're 11 and 8 and they still play a lot and their favorite kind of most used play object in our playroom continues to be floral gems. Like the little glass gems that would go in the bottom of it. They are so open like they are everything to these kids. They are used for everything. So I love that.
Rachel: Yeah, I love that. We got into this conversation too about loose parts because that is a really valuable part to play and it's so low budget. Like in fact, you actually you fabrics like scraps of things.
Laura: Scraps of fabrics, yeah.
Rachel: And see what it'll be because it'll be a lot of different things which is very different from like this is the one way you use this material or toy, which is not very playful, but when they can be inventive and use their own natural ingenuity and curiosity, you don't know what's gonna happen. The thing that parents and you, everybody gets to make their own decision but find a place in your space in your child's life that they can make a mess because that's a big part of this beauty around play. If they're worried about the mass or what they can't do, they're much less likely to feel the freedom of creativity. I do, I used to do things like take watercolors to a stream near our house. Nontoxic watercolors and let my kids paint rocks, that’s fine. You could make a mess. It'll wash right off and just if it needs to be outdoors at a public park, that's where they can get messy, mud washes off.
Laura: Yeah, I love that. I, you know, as a, as a parent to young when I was, had much younger children, there was all of these Pinterest boards and Instagram, you know, ideas about doing sensory play, you know, the rice and the colored pastas and stuff and that was not happening in my house. I just can't stand the feeling of rice under my feet or the mess. So we had a mud kitchen and the mud kitchen was a place where they could get dirty and messy. They use it, they still use it, you know, there, I mean, I gave it to my child as a her second like her two year old birthday present. They still use that at 11 and 8 and they use it in the snow too. So it's, it's perfect. Perfect. Yes. So they get all those good experiences with, you know, it is okay as parents, right? It's okay for us to acknowledge our own limitation.
Rachel: Everybody can have their own limitations. And in fact, I'd say we, I, I, I would say don't even worry about fancy stuff in a sensory table or especially food because there can be some like as we're getting into a little bit, like some people have a challenge with using food for play because.
Laura: 100% because there's food insecurity is a real issue. Yeah.
Rachel: So, but you could do something like, I just saw this in a center too as they were making something with corn and they were letting the kids peel the silk and instead of like adults are, like, get this off, let's get this done. We have cooking to do. The kids were like so enamored by the one little string and how it felt and really exploring that. But you could do that at home.
Laura: I love that.
Rachel: Little time for that. Right? But that's such a beautiful sensory experience and it's also getting you to something you need to do, which is make dinner. So.
Laura: Yeah, and involving kids in a meaningful way in their, I mean, gosh, beautiful. So I guess one of the things I just wanted to ask real quick, I feel like I, I get this question from parents a lot and I'm trying to figure out how to ask us in a nice way that, that you'll feel comfortable answering because so a lot, I feel like I interact with a lot of parents who have kids who are maybe two or three and they enjoy being home with their, with their kids. They like having them home but they feel like they are supposed to put their kids into care it for some particular reason like that they have to, that it's best for them that they need socialization. And I like, how do you feel about that? What is your recommendation? Do we have to put our kids into care?
Rachel: There is a lot of value that comes from early social experiences, from having to do those things that we've talked about, negotiate, react to someone regulate your own emotions. You don't learn as much about regulating your own emotions. If you don't have anyone to regulate, if you can just have whatever emotions you want. There's so there's the socialization part where you're kind of like figuring out how to work in a group, how to not always get your way, how to compromise, how to, how to, how to advocate for yourself, how to react to other people, regulate all that good stuff, how to make a friend, how to enter into play. There's three people over here. I actually want to go over there. The best way to do that is not to knock over everything they're doing, but as adults need to have that skill. So there is a lot to that.
There's also something a term I just recently heard from a researcher is this idea of social synchrony. And this happens to all of us, where are we kind of sync up mentally when we're together in a group? So this starts, which is not always good. Sometimes you have to break that group think up. But there is sort of like this social experience that happens with your brain that is positive. We're all missing each other. The the pandemic told us that we need people, we need to be together and that helps does help with development. There is, there is that is factual that is important. And if an early care and education quality program is available to you, that's a great way to do it. If it's not available to you or if it's not the right choice for your family, just find those social experiences.
So you don't want your child to go show up at kindergarten, not having any social experiences, especially if they don't have siblings or cousins that are kind of a piece of their neighbors or whoever you want them to have those purposeful social experiences where they, where things don't always go their way where they don't know, it's not working out, they're fighting, let's go home. They, you need that sustained kind of working it out, learning from, but it doesn't have to be in that formalized setting. You just want to make sure that you're doing, you're supplementing it and augmenting it in other ways. So, so I would say, you know, it is really good if you have the ability to do an early education program, that's high quality because if it's low quality, it can actually have a negative impact. So you don't want, you don't want to settle like, it's the best I can do even though it's not good at all because you're so worried about the social piece, that would be better served for doing, using your community or.
Laura: Like story times and music together classes.
Rachel: Exactly. Exactly. And just, yeah, getting them, having play dates, starting to do that kind of stuff is important and just recognizing it's not just to keep them busy, it is actually developing some pretty important skills.
Laura: Yeah. And at the same time, I think too, for those parents were, like, wait a second, I was so looking forward to, to three hours a day of, of preschool, you can do that too. Right. So kids can go to three hours a day of preschool and again, like, you can be supplementing at home and, oh, the, there's so many choices. We have so many choices in this day and age.
Rachel: And also, like, that's another false belief that we are competing with is a half day program of preschool is not richer than a full day program that embeds also the care. So, if you're a parent and you're saying, oh, well, my child's going to this childcare now because I need, I need the care as a working parent. But when they're older, I'm going to put them in preschool. Well, if it's a high quality early care and education program, it's doing everything a preschool would be and wrapping that into the entire day. So, we should stop having a, we, we, we like false choices in this country. It seems like not either or you can do all of it in the same place. And in fact, I mean, that's what we do. We would never, we, when we're thinking about the decisions we make for children, we're 100% thinking all the time about their learning and development. But that's why care is important. That's why play is important.
That's why these other things are part of the whole day because it's all part of their learning and development. Not, we don't separate our day into like, okay, the real learning happens in the morning and then the, that's just not how a high quality program manages itself, but we have this thinking about it like that. So again, if you can access you know, a high quality early care and education program for whatever hours you need for this, the routine and schedule is very valuable for children. So I would avoid like one day here, one day here, one day here, very unpredictable. That's hard on kids. So find some sort of predictable, especially the year before they go off to school is I would say that's the most important.
Laura: Awesome. Thank you so much, Rachel. It was so fun talking to you.
Rachel: Yeah, you too. I could talk about this for days as you could talk.
Laura: Same.
Rachel: Yeah.
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All right. That's it for me today. I hope that you keep taking really good care of your kids and your family and each other and most importantly of yourself. And just to remember, balance is a verb and you're already doing it. You've got this!