“Wonderful insights and great inspiration as usual! After watching the clean up songs and games video I realized that we weren't using song enough in our day to day routines. I kept this in mind today as I supported in classrooms and found myself making up chants and rhymes. It's amazing how fast you can capture the attention of a child with song v. a normal talking voice.

I'm really excited to see where things go with the idea of Skillful Observing. We've been talking a lot about objective vs. subjective wording at our school, both in our daily pages and other types of communications we have with partents. Being skillful in our observations takes the idea of observing so much further and I look forward to sharing some of these exercises with my staff.”

“This was such a wonderful explanation of the different stages of loose parts as well as developmental stages. As I was listening (and taking tons of notes) I was able to recognize where many of the children in my class already fall within the stages. Most are in the tote/carry/pile, but I also see a few moving into other parts – creating stories and narratives, convincing peers to use the parts in specific ways, coming up with ideas for the parts that surprise me by how they have decided to use them. I noticed, but without any kind of framework to place the observations on. This has given me a framework to use and I am really exicted to go back and observe the children with these new ideas/framework and assess where they are and how they are using the simple loose parts I have made available to them so far. Thanks for these videos!”