Embodied Learning

🔔 New Training Alert! 🎈
Introducing: "Making Sense of the Reggio Approach."

Today, I'm introducing a new PD for early childhood educators and administrators.
I thought and worked a lot on this one.

"Making Sense of Reggio" is a much-needed PD training, particularly in the United States.

The " talk" on social media and in thousands of centers and programs is almost exclusively about materials, equipment, environment settings, and provocations.
Well, cold. No, a little colder: Children are the core and essence of this educational approach.

The Reggio approach is primarily about trusting and believing in every child as a naturally competent, equally respected, active individual in our communities.
Children (not materials, equipment, environments, and provocations) are the enablers and protagonists of the learning experience.

This new PD is about "entering" a child's mind (and body) and embodying how children discover, experience, play, and explain the world to themselves daily.

Do you believe in children? Can you trust children? Are you prepared and ready to learn from children?
This PD Training is for you.

1. Read the PD launch article here: https://embodiedlearning.co/reggio-approach-professional-development/
2. Spread the news among your educators-friends
3. Join the conversation and ask questions in the comments
4. Feel free to contact me to learn more.
�Thanks! 🤍

🌺 Thank you to all the new (August-September) clients who opened their schools and centers’ doors to for their faculty and staff PD training sessions!

★★★★★
We always met fantastic, dedicated, and passionate educators: with them, we experienced through sensory explorations and movement activities how to support, trust, and believe in children’s competence and natural, autonomous learning superpowers.

It’s a joy and a pleasure to share the research work on early childhood with all of you! 🤍🤍🤍

📣 STAY TUNED: A new PD Training launch is coming very soon!


Don’t ask children anything. Question everything (they do) instead.

Last July, August, and early September, I worked with early childhood educators in Melbourne, Australia, NY, MD, NJ, and DC, experimenting with a new team-building approach: Understanding a school or childcare center faculty as a group of researchers.

The diversity and unicity of young individuals in one classroom allow an educator to explore and learn about current early childhood needs.

If called researchers, educators’ attitudes in the classroom are new and different. Their leading question is: “What can children teach us about early learning?”

It worked! Educators found it incredibly rewarding to question and research day-to-day observations, assessments, and documentation. They loved transforming their weekly team meetings into time for pedagogical conversations and celebrations of the work with children.

Building educators’ teams as researchers is part of my strategy to enable a more child-centered early childhood education that values and validates children’s autonomous learning, discoveries, and competence.

What’s your educators’ team up to this school year?

G’day and thank you to our new clients in ! 🇦🇺

During the summer break in the Northern Hemisphere, I met with sensational, dedicated educators in and .

We questioned everything about the new role of the in kinders (preschools) and childcare centers. 

We also measured the impact of the world’s hardest pandemic lockdowns on young children and early learning compared to other countries where is active.

We joyfully played and worked on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong Boon Wurrung peoples of the Eastern Kulin. We respectfully acknowledge them as the Traditional Owners of the land where we gathered and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.

Looking at my desk, I have a 9:1 reading ratio: I read (or reread, or browse) at least nine old books for every new book I read. Why? Because I need motivation and joy.

Most (not all) new books about early childhood are about something other than children. They are about the adults who surround children.
They point out how to solve problems quickly without analyzing or explaining them thoroughly, highlight dramatic data about development but encourage the reader to intervene "over and above" the child rather than "with" the child, and ultimately present children as incomplete humans who need to be fixed.

Despite some outdated content, I like to read some selected older ECE literature (from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s) because it believes in children and spreads an enthusiastic trust in childhood. I need that.

I also need young educators to believe in children and trust them on their natural journey to "learn how to learn."
I need young educators to read old books! And a few amazing new ones.

Here is my ECE book list for summer 2024.
In the comments, you will find a link to each book (and a few lines about my choice). Enjoy!

The (amazing) New One:
1. This is Me and Only Me (2024) by Giorgia Lupi and Madeleine Garner

Nine Amazing Old Books You Should Read or Read Again (and Again):
2. The Hundred Languages of Children (2005, first edition: 1996) by Sergio Spiaggiari and Reggio Children
3. Playground (2015) by James Mollison
4. Sensory Integration and the Child (2008, first edition: 1979) by A. Jean Ayres
5. The Culture of Education by Jerome Bruner
6. The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories (1996, first edition: 1973) by Gianni Rodari
7. Babyjahre (1995, German edition) by Remo H. Largo
8. Child’s Talk: Learning to Use Language (1985, first edition: 1983), by Jerome Bruner
9. The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of Computer (1993), by Seymour Papert
10. Everything Has a Shadow, Except Ants (1999, first edition: 1990) by Reggio Children

In the first half of 2024, added many new clients! 🚀🚀🚀
At the end of the school year, we’re proud to share a few recent acquisitions who are happily working with us. 
Thank you very much for your dedication and efforts to provide high-quality services for the early childhood!

I’m preparing new PD workshops for clients in Australia, the Tri-state area, and DC. “Imagination” is at the core of my current research since preschool and center directors keep reporting a massive lack of it among young children.
“Control” is the other topic I’m exploring: adults’ control over children’s play, choices, ideas, and explanations.

It came to help 1973’s Gianni Rodari’s “The Grammar of Fantasy,” a book I will never stop reading, which I hope will be republished soon.

While explaining the game of pretending “Do as if,” Rodari defines it as “The game in which the child has imaginative control over things.”
 
“Imaginative control.”
‘Of course,’ I am thinking and typing: As part of being human, children need control, especially in a social environment where everybody wants to control something (or somebody), if not everything.
Since the “real” world and time have already been taken (in control) by the adults, every child’s mind can reactively produce thousands and thousands of other worlds and timeframes that don’t obligate them “to respect the properties of the objects” or the rules of the grownups, and only what is possible, doable, true, and proven.
Children free themselves using imagination.

“Imaginative control.” (What an oxymoron!)
This natural activity is now fading among young children in this part of the world. If you are reading this, you most likely are in that same part of the world.
I’m done mentioning digital devices, screens, and COVID lockdowns as possible causes. Let’s focus on control.

Is the lack of children’s imagination due to too much control? 
Is our (adults) pervasive control limiting young children’s chances to escape into their minds to their imaginative worlds and times?

Please join the conversation in the comments.
Thanks!  

Child Development Milestones: Can Your Kid Do These Things Yet? A 1970s list of child development milestones for 6-year-olds is shocking today, as we expect kids to do so much less on their own.

I recently worked with great educators at 92nd Street Y Nursery School on sensory learning and movement as key to children’s autonomous discoveries and competence.

In my self-reflection after training, a thought popped into my head: “Did I work enough with them on imagination?”

Wherever I go, educators and preschool directors report a lack of imaginative thinking in young children.

Unwittingly, we all live in the illusion that our devices have all the answers.
The attitude of always having a solution inside the phone in our pockets or the voice AI in our homes has started impacting young children’s thinking.

“If there’s already an answer to any question out there – thinks today’s child – why do I need to wonder?”

The work on children’s competence in early childhood education is more than ever pivoted around children’s imagination. 

Please help out, folks: let the children always go to that fantastic place inside their minds where answers don’t need to be true, real, or accurate but are still the natural foundation of thinking. Thank you!

Thank you to the mighty for the terrific photo documentation of my session at the and “Art of Play and Wonderment Conference 2024.”

I love this funny photo. Rebecca K. of took it during our latest faculty PD training.

If you have recently worked with me or experienced one of my workshops and have some brilliant, humorous, or inspiring pictures or footage, you are welcome to share them with me via messenger or the channels linked in my bio. Thanks!

BTW, that thing in front of me on the table is not Spaceball’s Dark Helmet.

I recently worked with a beautiful international preschool in Austin, TX, on “Reggio-inspired Documentation.”
We encountered the challenge of documenting and ‘dealing with the curriculum.’
In a broad conversation about ‘learning,’ an incredibly talented and dedicated teacher asked me, “Where is the limit [of learning]?”

I am very thankful for that question.
Its context was cognitive and knowledge-based learning. The educator was concerned. If they had followed children’s interests further, it would have stepped into the upper-grade curriculum and “ruined” the work of their colleagues the year after.

Many teachers are trapped in this dilemma. Here is my perspective on overcoming this curriculum-related challenge.

By nature, learning has no limits. Children’s learning is not linear. It has at least three dimensions: physical, emotional, and cognitive.

To a first reading, most ECE curricula praise cognitive, academic, and knowledge-based learning and rarely highlight, or at least intertwine, the importance of the physical and emotional components in each individual’s unique learning experience.

However, a curriculum is not a step-by-step instruction manual about how children learn or an essay about children’s competence: It’s guidelines!

Read with me: “Guide-Lines.”
Just two paragraphs above, I wrote, “Children’s learning is not linear; it has at least three dimensions.” Now, the real fun begins.

Learning doesn’t fit within a line or a guide-line.
Educators ensure that every child has the freedom and the right to broaden that line in every dimension and explore anything in as many ways as they can think or imagine—physically, emotionally, and cognitively.

Don’t let yourself be confined by a guideline. Talk with your colleagues about children’s competence. Observe them while naturally stressing the limits that are on paper.

Thank you for looking over, beyond, and above the line with your children.
Thank you for supporting children enjoying all the dimensions of learning through their bodies and emotions.

There’s a huge misunderstanding around “play-based” pedagogy, especially in early childhood education.

Play-based doesn’t mean gamified.
Play-based doesn’t mean adult or teacher-led, teacher-designed, teacher-planned, teacher-prepared, teacher-controlled, teacher-managed, teacher-ruled.

Play emanates from children.
While immersed in play, children are protagonists of their independent creative, social, developmental, and learning pathways.
Where is the teacher or the adult, then? Outside of it, not in the play, neither at its core nor at its edge.

I never used “play-based” in my practice. I prefer to say “child-centered.”
Try this now: anytime you bump into so-called “play-based” activities, units, classes, curricula, or events, ask yourself: “Is it child-centered?” Or:
“Are the children playing independently?”
If the answer is “No,” then what’s happening before you isn’t actually play-based. It’s something else, something that has an adult behind it, calling “play” a different thing.

Share your thoughts in the comments. Thank you.

I recently ran a workshop about in young children.

Competence is how children develop self-awareness naturally.
Infants, toddlers, and young children’s awareness of being capable of specific actions and decisions they have learned independently from the adults in the room keeps their intrinsic motivation, sense of agency, purpose, and curiosity awake.

The competent child is never bored. For the competent child, boredom is an opportunity, not an obstacle.

Back to reality, they asked me a question about . “What if I want to teach children how to make a specific product?”
This question has been bouncing inside my mind for two weeks now.

I’m not bothered by how commodities and product-based learning impact early childhood education and young children’s healthy development today (yet).
I am stressing the meaning of today, though.
Is teaching young children disregarding their innate ?
Is teaching young children becoming an instruction-based form of control?
Is teaching transforming children’s natural boredom into a behavioral issue?
Please join the conversation.

I went to Florida ( 😘) to talk about children’s . 
The paradox for the generation of children born surrounded by the internet, digital devices, and social media is that almost every isn’t happening by chance, randomly, unintentionally, or by mistake anymore.

Living with the certainty of having an explanation for everything inside the device in our pockets unwittingly builds a social environment that suffocates young children’s autonomous discoveries.

These discoveries become irrelevant to the adults’ eyes – unless we, the adults, have prepared an environment, a setting, and a space purposefully anticipating a specific discovery moment we want to witness, celebrate, take a photo of, and maybe publish on our profiles.

Is that discovery still about the kids (and children’s development) or actually about us?


         

I recently worked with (😘) in New York on exploring the potential of materials and how to foster children’s discoveries through materials.

I remember asking a question that made all educators reflect: “Who controls all these materials?” 
I wanted to remind my audience of the importance of children’s self-guided learning experiences, in which kids have ownership rights over the processes related to discoveries, ideas, and creations.

Autonomous learning experiences lead the pathway to self-awareness and identity. Giving children free access to materials elevates the impact of your emergent curriculum on children’s development. 

Finally, we rediscovered that the most fascinating material is our body – ourselves. 
How many more discoveries and inventions can happen if we give children the naturally needed time and space for physical, emotional, and cognitive development? 


         

Let’s talk prewriting, or “pregrafismo” in my mother tongue.
I’ve always been fascinated by that time when children realize they can leave a trace in this world.
 
Yet, in these fast, anxious, and furious times, it’s easy to put that trace into the “early literacy” compound and lead it out of context. 

It’s an obsessive sprint: Letters, numbers, reading, writing. STOP.
Look at the picture. 
Find a few strings in the kitchen drawer or remove shoelaces from your shoes. Lie down on the ground. 
Put the strings in front of your eyes and start playing with them. 
Observe your body scheme, coordination of arms and balance, the work of your eyes and fingers, and your imagination. 
If you didn’t trace a geometric figure or a letter right away, then you made it: you have been embodying the mind of a prewriting child.

If a square, a circle, or a letter lies in front of you, give yourself permission to create something that doesn’t belong to a code: something that is quintessentially yours.

Prewriting isn’t about learning a code. It’s the (body and mind) process of finding your way to express yourself.
Tomorrow morning, in school, enjoy observing children leaving their traces!

           

Stop. Step back. Observe. Can you see THEM? Yes, the SIMPLE THINGS. 
They are so simple and so complex and beautiful at the same time.

How much sensory-motor and cognitive competence is involved in drinking from a fountain at the age of 2, 3, or 4?

How many discoveries happen while approaching that experience and getting familiar with it through repetition?

How many discoveries, learning blocks, and new experiences do children gain while “repeating” a simple action?

Enjoy children’s process of learning how to drink from a fountain.

You don’t need to teach children how to drink, walk, wash hands, or jump. WHY? Because children need to learn how to learn.

Thank you, Tom 🎈

My beloved Singing Water Bowl is ready to return to action! This time, I will use it in a workshop about and .
It’s actually a session about as a tool for discovery. The only thing hands won’t do is holding a phone. 😜👋

       

“While the child builds a tower, they are actually building themselves.”

At Embodied Learning, we tirelessly emphasize the importance of autonomous planning and self-guided building as landmarks of early learning.
Let children develop their own unique, original “design” and follow their very personal creative method.

Have you bumped into amazing constructions at your center? Share photos in the comments!

hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag hashtag

Every body can hear.

I learned about percussionist Evelyn Glennie 20 years ago, watching the stunning movie “Touch the Sound.”

Glennie has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12, having started to lose her hearing at the age of 8. This does not inhibit her ability to perform. She regularly plays barefoot during live performances and studio recordings to feel the music.

Glennie contends that deafness is largely misunderstood by the public. She explains that her teacher Ron Frobes taught her to hear with parts of her body other than her ears. Ron Frobes helped her in feeling the music other way from her body parts. She felt the upper drum from the waist up and the lower drum from waist down.

On her website Glennie published “Hearing Essay” in which she discusses her condition. Glennie also discusses how she feels music in different parts of her body in her TED talk “How To Truly Listen”, published in 2003. (Source: Wikipedia)

Check one of her records (very suitable for young children) on Spotify (album cover on image 2)!

Good morning!

2024 at Embodied Learning is the year of .

Many new clients booked professional development training programs to get teachers to experience first-hand the importance of autonomous, self-guided, independent learning experiences for young children.
 
In the upcoming months, I will guide many educators through this complex question: “Are you putting your school curriculum inside children’s minds and bodies, or are you finding the curriculum ‘inside the child’ by observing and listening to children’s discoveries, ideas, and play?”

What would you answer? And what’s the approach at your center? 

       

- “Hey Tree.”
- “Hey Sun.”
- “It’s so hot today.”
- “Let’s go to the ocean!”

Using layers to understand how the mind of a child creates a story.

“If children do it, we should do it too.” (Me)

Thank you, Bruno Munari, for everything. Check out: “Plus and Minus”
(original: + e -)

       

My 🌖 New Year resolution and wish for everyone who works and lives with children.🎈

“We don’t need to teach children things they can learn by themselves” (me)
#2024