For Your Binder

The first days of preschool can be stressful for everyone. In this short but helpful article, Lillian Katz offers a few ideas that might assist both parents and teachers.  #environment #learning #teaching #relationships #care 

This document came on my radar while I was taking the Pop Up Adventure Play Playworker Development Course 

I quickly realized that it serves as a functional "how-to" manual for anyone who not only says they want to be play based, but is really ready to put their money where their mouth is and make it happen.  The document is from 2019 so I am not sure if the workshops and consulting piece they mention is still available, but it's a worthy read all the same.  I read it three times and am still gleaning insight.  #play #teaching #learning #environment 

Worth the cost of the ink to print out all 140 pages!  From page 11:

This playbook aims to give readers:

• insight into gaps and issues inherent in thinking about inclusive playground design and practice

• insight into how inclusive playgrounds and their surroundings are experienced together

• potential strategies that will contribute to project discussions, designs, budgets, and more

• a depth and breadth of ‘how to’ guidance for designing inclusive playgrounds

• ways to ensure that any inclusively designed playground and its surrounding environment are accessible and welcoming to children with disabilities and their families

#play #inclusion #accessibility #equity #environment #recess #playgrounds #DAP #movement #outside #teaching #learning

If we don’t allow children the freedom to move their bodies in different ways with simple challenges, how do we expect them to become capable of navigating their environment without getting hurt? Risks and challenges are important for healthy sensory and motor development and this article will assist you in really understanding why!

#play #risk #movement #outside #teaching #learning #DAP

When it feels like common sense and everyone should just "know it" (but they don't) it can be affirming to read about why it feels that way.  Bottom-up behaviors are instinctual and unintentional. Top-down ones are deliberate and intentional. There is a difference. And how we approach them needs to be differentiated as well! #teaching #learning #relationships #specialed #expulsion #environment

The nursery (pre)school should be an extension of the family outward rather than of the elementary school downward. #mixedages #DAP #learning #teaching

Published in Pediatrics in June 2022 this link will bring you to the abstract which, although not the full paper,  provides enough data to remind us that young children are still not moving around enough. #play #movement #outside #recess #DAP #environment

This link will bring you to a very generous "snippets of the paper" page, it includes more than just the abstract though and some of you might have institutional access to the full study.   There has been little exploration into risky play in the context of urban neighborhoods so this study does just that. Not surprisingly, the study finds that there are enormous inequities in the distribution of wealth within cities which directly and indirectly impact outdoor play and hoe play spaces are maintained.  #play #outside #risk #environment #equity

Exploring panopticon as a program of power as opposed to an architectural system.  #learning #environment #panopticon

Play and exploration requires enormous amounts of unscheduled time - time to do whatever one wants to do, without pressure, judgment, or intrusion from authority figures.  #play #teaching #learning #mixedages