Creating Environments in Which Young Children Know They Have Permission to Play

For the past few years, orcas off the coast of Spain and Portugal have been ramming and often sinking smaller boats. Back in the 1980's, pods of orcas in the Pacific Ocean made a fad of wearing dead fish on their heads. The leading theory for these behaviors is play.

The orcas don't need to ram those boats and bite at their rudders, although I imagine them cheering one another on. There's no apparent reason for orcas to wear a dead fish on their heads, and the same can be said for young children laugh themselves silly while sporting, say, underpants on their heads. 

In my course Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning, one of the key things we will be exploring is how our classrooms, playgrounds, and homes can become the kind of environments in which young children know they have permission to play.

It's far easier said than done because so much of what school is about, so much of what playgrounds are about, is proscribed activities. You can climb this structure, but not that tree. You may slide down, but not climb back up. You can build with those blocks, but nothing higher than your head. 

And most manufactured toys come with "scripts" designed right into them. The fire truck is, well, a fire truck. That doll is from a Disney movie. Princess costumes, vehicles, action figures, tools, weapons, and pretty much anything made for kids "instructs" or "directs" the child's play. A creative child will, of course, find other ways to play with these toys . . . That is, if there isn't an adult nearby to tell them they're doing it wrong. 

But even when the adult stays out of it, researchers find that young children tend prefer the boxes the toys come in. The wrapping paper. The twist-ties and rubber bands and other packaging material. This tendency, what we call "loose parts play," frees children from the scripts and expectations, allowing them to fully engage in the deep, genuine learning that takes place from exploring without artificial constraints.

The best habitats for learning are those that embrace the promise and genius behind loose parts learning. There is far more learning in the recycling box than the toy box.

If this sounds like the kind of learning environment you want to offer to the young children in your life, please consider joining the 2024 cohort of Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning.  This 6-week course is a deep-dive into the impact of the environment on how and what young children learn, including the theory and practice of loose parts. It’s a course for early childhood educators, directors, and parents of young children who are interested in creating environments that inspire self-directed learning. 

Meanwhile, if you find yourself in a small boat off the Iberian coast, just hope the orcas are playing the dead fish on the head game that day, because otherwise it's liable to be a bit rowdy!

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

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

Transforming Classrooms Into Natural Learning Habitats

Psychologist Kurt Lewin, often recognized as the founder of social psychology and one of the most cited psychologists of the 20th century, developed what is known as Lewin's Equation: B = ƒ(P,E), in which our behavior (B) is a function of our personality (P) in the environment (E). 

In other words, behavior is the result of the interaction between our inner selves and the outer world. It's not a difficult concept to understand, indeed, it seems self-evident, but putting into an equation does, for me at least, crystalize and simplify an important dynamic. And it also highlights why so many of our efforts to change or influence our own behaviors, or the behaviors of others, so often fail.

Weight loss diets, for instance, often focus on transforming our relationship with food by somehow training ourselves, our personality (in the broadest sense of the word), to view food or eating in a new, healthier way and through that develop new food habits. When a child exhibits challenging behaviors such as hitting classmates, a typical response is to employ some combination of positive and negative reinforcements, sometimes in the form of rewards and punishments, in order to create new behavioral responses, or habits, to certain stimuli. These are both examples of addressing the P factor of Lewin's Equation: personality, or our inner selves.

Personality, of course, is not a fixed thing. It can and does change, but the arc of that change in humans is typically long, and to shorten it, which is what we try to do with these diets and reinforcements, is notoriously difficult. This usually requires us to call on will-power, which is to say regularly and consciously overriding the habits and instincts that cause us to behave in certain ways. It's hard enough when we're self-motivated to change ourselves, but neigh impossible when we are trying to change personality by proxy, as happens when adults are trying to modify the behavior of a child. Rewiring personality is a very difficult task for us habit-forming humans.

Usually, it's far easier to change E, the environment, which is to say changing what a person sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches on a daily basis. Indeed, whereas change in P involves lots of time and effort, changes in E can have an almost instantaneous impact on B.

For instance, we've all known children who bounce off the walls indoors, but who drop to their knees to study motes the moment they get outside. We've all known children who become "different people" when exposed to noisy, chaotic environments versus hushed, controlled ones. We ourselves find our behaviors altered, often in dramatic ways, when we find ourselves, say, at a cocktail party or in a confined space or on the penthouse floor of a skyscraper. 

Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood learning, postulated that each child has three teachers, adults, other children, and the environment. As early childhood educators and parents of young children, we tend to focus on the role of the adult teacher. Likewise, we know that it's important for the children in our care to have relationships with other children. However, that "third teacher," E, the environment, often gets short shrift. No where is this more evident that in cookie cutter classrooms and playgrounds, out of the box spaces that force children, no matter their personalities, to conform, and this has, obviously, a significant impact on behavior, including the what and how children learn. A poor learning environment can mean that the adults spend too much of their time and energy on managing behavior rather than focusing on what we should be doing, which is observing and supporting the children as they go about the business of following their own learning instinct, their curiosity, through play.

If this sounds like something you want to explore, please consider enrolling in my new 6-week course, Creating a Natural Habitat for Learning, where we will be taking a deep-dive into both the theory and day-to-day practicalities of transforming our classrooms, playgrounds, and homes into environments that work with children, and ourselves, in the spirit of a "third teacher." We will be exploring both indoor and outdoor environments, as well as aspects of environment that are often neglected, with an eye toward making our spaces the kind of flexible, open-ended natural learning habitats in which all children can thrive. Not to mention freeing the adults up to be the kind of educators we've always wanted to be. I would love for you to join us!

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

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

Is There Anything More Beautiful?

"Let's pretend . . ."

Is there any more beautiful way to start a sentence? 

It's an invitation to entwine imaginations.

Psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik, a pioneering researcher, writes in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter: "By far the most important and interesting problem for young children is figuring out what's going on in other people's minds. Theory of mind, as it's called, is the ability to figure out the desires, perceptions, emotions, and beliefs of other people . . . Children who pretend more have a distinct advantage in understanding other people."

Gopnick sees the period from 18 months to five years as "the great watershed" for developing theory of mind.

When I hear "Let's pretend . . ." I know I'm not needed as the children engage with this "most important and interesting problem." I can, as a teacher, turn my attentions elsewhere, although there are few things more delightful than to act as a fly on the wall as children weave their stories of princesses and firefighters and mommys and daddys. They might pop on a hat or a cape or wrap a scarf around their waist and in that instant they are transformed into something they were not, embodying a person, or even an animal, about whom they are curious or by whom they are inspired. And then they play their way to a deeper understanding of another's experience from the inside out. When it begins with "Let's pretend . . ." it means they are doing it in collaboration with another mind who is likewise transformed.

As adults we tend to stop inviting one another with "Let's pretend . . ." although reading fiction or engaging with drama via theater or screen serve a similar purpose. Research finds that reading fiction, especially literary fiction, greatly increases empathy for, and understanding of, others. Even more so than a movie, novels put us into the minds, or shoes, of others, allowing us to experience the world from a new perspective and that works on us in much the same way that "Let's pretend . . ." works for young children.

The great beauty of "Let's pretend . . ." for early childhood educators is that most of the time all we have to do to make it happen is get out of the children's way. It emerges. Even without costumes, even without props, children are driven to entwine with one another to explore this most important and interesting problem.

"Let's pretend . . . " Is there anything more beautiful?

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

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

How to Not Become an Angry Old Man

Walt Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

It's perhaps my favorite line from my favorite poem, Song of Myself.

It is an acknowledgement that the self is the sum total of everything we have seen, smelled, tasted, heard, and felt. It is that moment when we recognize that we are not any one thing, but rather all the things and all of our responses to things. It's true of me. It's true of you. And it is true of all of us together. It is both a simple and great truth.

As I approach the final third of my life, I'm concerned that I don't become one of those angry old men. It's something to guard against, given how many of us age into a kind of bitterness. From the time we were children, the world told us to keep our heads up and our eyes forward. We're asked as children, "What are you going to be when you grow up?" We're never asked, "Who are you right now?" 

We're urged to "Keep your eye on the prize!" We are rarely asked if we are satisfied with right now. 

We're told our career paths must be ever upward, that achievement is about striving toward goals, and that if only we work hard enough we will reach the promised land.

When I listen to those angry old men, they tell stories that begin not as "Once upon a time," but as "Back in my day." No wonder they are angry. Their day is in the past. And, to boot, all these whippersnappers are doing it wrong. No one will ever again ask them, "What are you going to be?" They are now and forever stuck with who they are right now as the rest of the world continues becoming.

They are no longer large. They no longer contain multitudes. They have become a fixed point kept in place by memories and to do or be anything else is a contradiction. And contradiction is not to be tolerated. No wonder they are angry.

When I hear those angry old men railing against the young, the "lazy millennials," for instance, I breath more deeply and find myself in that so-called laziness. When they gripe about this or that technology, I strive to embrace it and to make it mine. When I detect that old man anger in myself, I remind myself that it is really fear and the antidote to fear is, always, to turn toward the unknown, and lay my hands on it the way a child does, which is, as the great Bev Bos reminded us, the only way it will ever find a place in my head or my heart.

This is why we must have young children in our lives, why we must bring them back from the pink collar ghettos into which we, parents, caretakers, and educators alone are privy to the secret to understanding the multitudes within ourselves. Children belong in the center of life because they are they are large. Life without their wisdom of turning toward the unknown and laying hands upon it, is one that is ever narrowing, one that teaches us that we're in this alone. It tames us, it contains us. But when there are young children in our lives to remind us, to teach us, we can more easily embrace our contradictions, become large again, and to again contain multitudes.

And we can sing:

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

That is the kind of "old man" I want the children I teach to grow up to be.

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

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

Play is How We Survive

There are some who say that if there are humans in the distant future, we'll have to exist without our cute little pinky toes. The rest of our toes still play a role in balance and movement, but the one that goes "wee wee wee all the way home" isn't a significant part of that. Combine this with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle that is making balance and movement less and less important to survival, and it's so long little toe.

Not every evolutionary scientist predicts this, but it makes sense because that's the way Darwinism works: those aspects of a species that help it survive tend to continue to be reproduced in future generations, and those that don't, don't.

There are those who don't "believe" in evolution, but farmers have been taking advantage of the principles of evolution since the beginning of farming, long before Darwin. The difference is that instead of it being "natural selection" in charge, it's we ourselves who pick "survivors" based on what we perceive to be desirable traits. There was a time before crops were cultivated, when most wheat grass plants produced a single head with, at most, a handful of berries (kernels). Under human farming, the typical wheat plant grows five heads containing 22 berries per head. Humans made that happen.

Our farm animals have also undergone a similar process of "human selection." Breeding practices have brought us meeker, meatier cows, and chickens that produce larger quantities of eggs. 

So whether or not one believes in evolution, the process postulated by Darwin does happen, virtually right before our eyes.  

Indeed, we're even trying to steer our own evolution. When we choose our mates, we are choosing for the survival of certain traits. Eugenics movements sprang up as a direct result of Darwin's theory, as racists sought to "perfect" our species through "unnatural selection." Today, there are high IQ sperm banks, artificial selection, IVF, and even genetic modification to "select" for preferred traits, like good health or blue eyes.

From one perspective, our dabbling could well be viewed as a kind of Tower of Babel cautionary tale, in which humans have displeased the gods with our ambition and pride. Some of this sounds like a horror movie. Some of it is a godsend. And much of it, seems, well, normal.

We have been steering our own evolution, one way or another, through the choices we make for much of our human existence. Even the plants and animals we modify, in turn modify us.

The theory of "organic evolution" suggests that one of the primary ways steer our own evolution is through play. Through the exercise of free will, the theory goes, which is to say through play, animals, including humans, discover adaptive behaviors that are then adopted by others. I think of this as "viral learning." 

A family once donated several boxes of intravenous fluid bags. I left a box of them near our playground cast iron water pump for several days. The children had no idea what they were, of course, but one day, a boy tried filling one with water. This then went viral as child after child filled bags. Not long after this, another child discovered that under certain circumstances, the water would shoot out of the nozzle attached to the bags. Then, over several days, through trial and error, they figured out that it only worked when you held the bag higher than the nozzle, a discovery that was soon common knowledge. 

Will knowing how IV fluid bags work help these children survive? I don't know. Obviously, the specific skill may not be widely applicable, but understanding how fluid works, how gravity works, how learning from others works, definitely is. That a clutch of children in a single preschool figured this out may not directly impact their ability to procreate, and they won't pass these behaviors along through their genes. But as these children go out into the world, the behaviors they learned through this process may very well come into play.

The theory of "organic evolution" holds that we evolved to play, at least in part, in order to adaptively steer our own evolution. And like with Darwinian evolution, not all the "mutations" prove fruitful, but the ones that do, survive by helping us survive. In all likelihood, the children's viral learning around IV fluid bags will be forgotten by time, but it's also possible that scientists 40,000 years from now will look back on this moment as a turning point in our evolution, like the advent of the opposable thumb or the development of language. It seems doubtful, but you never know. Evolution is a long game.

And it's not just Homo sapiens. Other mammals play as well. As do birds and reptiles. There is even evidence that invertebrates, like snails, engage in play behaviors. In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer cites evidence that might suggest that even plants play. Forest scientist Peter Wohlleben makes similar claims in his book The Hidden Life of Trees. It wouldn't at all surprise me at all if we one day conclude that play is as essential to our definition of life as reproduction and respiration. 

Play has a reputation for being frivolous in that it has no obvious purpose other than, perhaps physical exercise. According to this theory of "organic evolution," however, play is central to our species' evolution. It's how we came up with such essential human survival behaviors as dance, music, art, engineering, math, literacy, and even animal husbandry. Play is how we've evolved to discover new things, how we learn, and, ultimately, how we survive.

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

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

Oh Brother, Thwarted Again!

Nothing is certain

It could always go wrong.

Come in when it's raining

Go on out when it's gone. 

          

          ~The Greatful Dead

"Oh brother, not again!"

It had become one of our classroom jokes. I have no idea where it came from, but it's a common enough expression that it's not surprising that it cropped up in a preschool classroom. 

I say it was a joke, and the kids meant it humorously, but there were no belly laughs. They were using it the way adults use expressions like this, as a way to respond when life thwarts us. And there's always lot of thwarting.

When we observe children at play, much of what we witness is thwarting. The block tower topples over. We trip and fall. We want a red one, but all that's left are blue ones. We want to play one game and our friends a different one. 

The old Yiddish expression, "Man plans and God laughs" is another of these expressions.

"If I didn't laugh, I'd cry all day" is yet another.

There isn't nearly as much thwarting as we might think, although it doesn't always seem that way. Our brains are prediction machines. Generally speaking, when our predictions prove correct, it doesn't even rise into our conscious awareness. It's usually only when our predictions prove wrong that our conscious minds are brought to bear. 

Some have even asserted that if nothing ever went wrong we would have no need for consciousness at all.

Linus: "Don't worry, Charlie Brown, you win a few and you lose a few."

Charlie Brown: "(Sigh) Wouldn't that be nice."

And without consciousness, we would have no sense at all of being alive. If we never failed, if everything went according to plan, if life were perfect, we would have no need to know about it. It's the thwarting that brings our attentions to bear on life, it's what calls us to action, even if it sometimes feels like thwarting is all there is. Without thwarting, success means nothing.

Of course, sometimes all the thwarting frustrates or angers us. Sometimes it makes us cry all day. Sometimes the thwarting overwhelms us, but on a day-to-day basis, every mentally healthy person must learn to shrug or laugh or roll their eyes. We might not laugh exactly, but the cosmic joke is that it's the thwarting that ultimately connects all of humanity.

When a child says "Oh brother, not again" I hear a child who is learning to take the thwarting in stride. And when they then return to the task at hand, whatever it is, with a new plan, with corrections, with the wisdom of previous thwarting under their belt, I see a child who is learning. 

Without thwarting, there is no need for thinking. 

Without thinking there is no learning. 

Without learning there is no life.

"Oh brother, not again!"

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

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

It's the Risk That Matters

A woman approached me at the entrance to Trader Joe's the other day. She wanted to talk to me about a group she belongs to that meditates for world peace. I have nothing against either meditation or world peace, but I was hoping to get in-and-out, so I took the card she handed me and started to move past her. As I did, she stopped me, "May I ask you a question? Don't you worry about riding your bike out there in all this traffic? I know I worry about you all."

This is far from the first time someone has expressed this to me, going back decades. I've spent my entire life, from the time I learned to ride, sharing the road with cars. There have been a few close calls, but not as many as you might think. In part that may be because drivers aren't as "crazy" as we've let ourselves believe, but mostly, I think, it's because I've learned to stay alert to my surroundings while on the bike.

In the rest of my life, I can let my mind wander, but on the bike, on roads full of pot holes and random debris, amidst cars and trucks and buses, all being driven by people who may or may not be giving their full minds to the task, I better stay alert . . . or else! And it's my alertness that has kept me relatively unscathed over the decades. (I'm knocking on wood as I write this!)

This is a powerful thing for my 63-year-old brain, even if it means taking risks with my 63-year-old body.

One of the delightful things about working with young children is that young minds are exceedingly plastic, which makes it a perfect mechanism for absorbing data about the world. Everything is new. Novelty is everywhere. You never know what to expect next, so you better stay alert. They say that our brains are prediction machines, that we don't perceive the world as it is, but rather as we expect it to be. This is essential to survival, but it can sometimes blind us, or cause us to gloss over, changes both large and small. But you can't get much past a young child because they are so alert to anything out of the ordinary. I like to think that's one of the things cycling does for me as well.

There was a time, not very long ago, when we believed, as a fact of biology, that adult brains simply stopped being so plastic. This was determined by studying bonobos (one of our species' closest relatives) in cages. Perhaps not surprisingly, when scientists thought to study bonobos who were not in cages, they found that adult brains retained much of their plasticity, which is to say their capacity for learning new things, throughout their lives.

I've been thinking about those cages as a metaphor as I've moved into the final third of my life. Too many of my peers become befuddled, disinterested, and set in their ways. We generally think that this is just a natural part of aging, but what if these prediction machines we carry around in our heads have, over time, simply built a cage that doesn't allow us to perceive much of anything beyond the bars of the expected? If our brain expects nothing new, it becomes less alert, less capable of caring about, let alone perceiving, novelty.

When we watch a young child encounter something new, they approach it with some combination of excitement, trepidation, and curiosity, all of which are manifestations of alertness. As they contemplate this novel thing, as they handle it, as they ask questions about it, they're in a state of open-minded awareness, beyond the cage of hidebound prediction. They then, as they play with that object, begin to feel the satisfaction of mastery, of knowing, of understanding. In the natural order of things, this is followed by an alert restlessness that draws them toward the next new thing. This entire process is a visceral experience of our plastic brains absorbing data then gradually solidifying around what we perceive to be true before moving on to the next new thing.

And the cycle repeats like a flexing muscle.

A mind that stops being alert, that anticipates nothing new, falls increasingly into a cycle of habit, which helps to further ensure that nothing new happens, including learning. 

This is all just personal theory, based on my admittedly limited understanding of brain science and my more extensive experience in observing young children at play, which is to say, while learning at full capacity.

Of course, when people worry about me out there on my bike, I generally just agree with them, showing crossed fingers, but that belies my confidence (if that's the right word) in my own ability to remain alert for anything that seems amiss, unusual, or odd. And, yes, at the end of the day, it's the fear that I might get injured or even die, that compels me to be alert.

It's the risk that matters. Real, visceral risk, including risk of the social, emotional, and intellectual variety. Children need this as well. And they know it. This is why no matter how safe we try to make things, the children in our care invariably attempt to play the risk back into it: they climb too high, go too fast, wrestle, hide, and explore as we overly-cautious adults scold them back to "safety." There are no reliable statistics on playground injury rates, but what little we have tends to tell us that our "safe" playgrounds do nothing to reduce injury, and may, in fact, lead to an increase. I suspect that's because when everything is padded, when all the corners are rounded, the children perceive that they can let their guard down, to be less alert. When they perceive that there's nothing here that can hurt them, they fall into the habit of letting their minds wander from the task at hand, and as a person who has spent as much time as I have cycling amidst traffic, that's when things get truly dangerous.

I appreciate the people who worry about me, but I'm happy that none of them have the power, the way adults do over children, to force me to stop. Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, points out that our minds have evolved for hunting and foraging, free from our self-imposed cages, both alert and on the move in a world full of both hazards and opportunities, fingers crossed. It's called being alive.

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

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