Resources & Inspiration

Play-responsive practice is about knowing how to respond to children's play through careful observation and professional judgment. In Suzanne Axelsson's book, The Original Learning Approach, she describes three complementary educator roles: the Playworker, who protects the conditions for play; the Facilitator, who joins children in play to extend learning without taking over; and the Teacher, who intentionally connects children's experiences to new knowledge. The key is not choosing one role, but recognizing which role the moment calls for.

Modern adults keep asking why kids seem more anxious, dysregulated, impulsive, fragile, dependent, and socially under-practiced than they used to be. Teachers feel it. Parents feel it. Pediatricians, counselors, coaches, grandparents, pastors, librarians, and school leaders feel it too.

But I think we often ask the question too late in the story. Before we ask what is wrong with kids, we should ask what happened to the childhood ecosystem around them.

Discover how open-ended play helped children and families begin healing after the July 4th flood. Learn how Imagination Playground inspired creativity, resilience, connection, and hope during a time of community recovery.

Practical considerations as you bring your outdoor classroom to life! Meet California-based landscape contractor, Mark Dulaney, in our FREE 1-hour live online "Ask a Nature Explore Designer" session focused on bringing your outdoor classroom design to life.

Storytelling is one of the oldest and most powerful tools for fostering connection, imagination, and learning in young children. This session explores how you can harness storytelling and storyacting to support foundational literacy skills in developmentally responsive, playful ways. Drawing from research-based insights, including the Science of Reading, and years of hands-on experience, this session offers practical strategies you can immediately implement in your classrooms.

Throughout the session, you’ll explore a variety of ways to wave the “magic wand” of storytelling in your setting—sharing folk and fairy tales, narrating creative movement experiences, and using quick anecdotes to scaffold transitions and routines. You’ll discover how, with each story you tell, you can nurture children’s capacity to transform their experiences into the wondrous web that underpins their play, reading, writing, problem-solving, and interactions with others.

A summer course to set you up for a sensational back to school classroom, with a greater level of engagement, collaboration, and participation from the children in your care.

In this episode, we explore common sensory disruptions and how they may impact children's behavior, learning, and interactions. We'll discuss practical strategies for recognizing and interpreting sensory cues, helping you better understand what children may be communicating through their actions. You'll also learn ways to identify when additional supports or interventions may be beneficial.

In this episode of The Everything ECE Podcast, Carla Ward sits down with Heather Bernt-Santy, better known as That Early Childhood Nerd, to explore the fascinating world of schema play! Heather shares how recognizing schemas helps educators move beyond simply managing behaviour and instead see the learning, curiosity, and development taking place through play. From transporting and trajectory to enclosing and enveloping, these repeated patterns offer valuable insight into how children make sense of their world.

In this episode, Erica Saccoccio is joined by Veronica Green for a powerful conversation on child-led play, observation skills, and what it truly means to build confidence as an early childhood educator.

Together, they explore how slowing down in early childhood environments can unlock deeper learning, strengthen educator reflection, and support children’s natural curiosity. Veronica shares practical strategies for using observation intentionally, responding to children in the moment, and creating learning environments that are truly responsive—not rushed or controlled.

Nature is not just pretty. It is medicine. It is our teacher. It is mud, microbes, moss, noise-softening, nervous-system-settling magic.

In this episode of Play Nature Podcast, Rusty Keeler talks with researcher Alex Barrable about the deep and delightful ways humans connect with the natural world.

Alex shares how becoming a parent brought her back to nature, how children help adults slow down to “Earth speed,” and why our bodies and brains are still wired for green, wild, living places.