They're Just Playing... Or Are They? I have spent most of my career explaining to adults why play matters. After nearly 30 years of working with children and families, I have watched children learn some of their most important skills while the adults around them saw nothing more than children playing. But at one point, I wanted to know what parents actually thought about play. So I asked them. As part of an action research study, I surveyed eleven parents who had children between birth and...

As an early childhood educator, one of the things I have learned over the years is that children rarely fit neatly into a chart. We like charts. We like milestones. We like knowing that a three-year-old should be doing this, a four-year-old should be doing that, and a five-year-old should be ready for school. But children do not develop in neat little boxes. Children grow from foundations. Those foundations are built from many things: nutrition, sleep, attachment, housing, trauma, family...

What Parents Believe School Readiness Is Back to school is around the corner and it reminds me of one of the biggest questions I am asked by parents is: "Is my child ready for preschool?" When parents ask this question, they are often looking at the academic skills they can easily see and measure. · "My child knows their ABCs." · "They can count to twenty." · "They know their colors and shapes." · "They can write their name." Some children can even read a few words...