Teachers and educators often ask me: “Should we teach children these skills, or can they learn them themselves?”

Discover how children’s (0-5) Sensory Perception and Movement impact their Autonomous Learning and Competence.

Our approach in this PD training is: “If children do it, we should do it too.”

Agenda & Learning Topics:

• Exploring Tactile, Auditory, and Olfactory Systems, their Integration, and Beyond
  Activity #1: Resonating Clothing Hangers
  Activity #2: “The Journey to Standing Up”
  Activity #3: “Peeling an Orange”
  Topics: Time perception; stimuli’s intensity; tactile and auditory competence; fine and gross motor skills + imagination; balance and kinesthetics; curiosity and discovery; autonomous learning experiences v. direct instruction.
• Exploring Balance, Sound, Gravity, and Behavior
  Activity #4: Body Xylophone (Sensory Integration, Psychomotor Education, Special Needs)
  Activity #5: “Running and Laughing”
  Activity #6: Paper Parachute
  Topics: Proprioception, sensory integration & behavior, overstimulation, self-regulation, elements of psychomotor education, sensory integration through collaborative play
  
  
• Learning from Everyone’s Sensory Systems through Play and Movement
  Activity #7: “Snowball Fight”
  Activity #8: “That’s You!” a Body-scheme game
  Topics: Sensory integration through collaborative play, body scheme and discovery of the individual “form,” embodied cognition, and learning through imitation.

The areas surrounding daycare centers and preschools always provide opportunities for children to escape confining indoor spaces and open their eyes to what’s outside.

Urban and natural settings can inspire them to move, play, explore, and learn in a completely new way.

Explore the benefits of outdoor learning!
Discover and understand the pedagogical potential of the outdoor space around your early learning facility.

Learn how to prepare outdoor areas for learning through play.
Learn how to support children’s physical, social, and emotional development outdoors.
Learn practically how to implement your academic curriculum in outdoor education.

Learning Objectives:

• Explore Natural Materials
  Working with light, shadows, water, grass, dirt, sticks, sand, clay, rocks, and more – in ways that are both creative and practical – you learn how to develop new settings and activities that allow you to engage with toddlers and preschoolers in a variety of projects outside the classroom. 
• Move and Learn
  You will build and try out zero-budget constructions and settings that enhance children’s movement and curiosity.
  
  
• Let Go
  This training program will give you an extensive kit of safe and practical ideas designed to foster autonomous learning. Learn how to let children go and observe their development under the open sky.
• Play and Explore (Academics Outdoors)
  You will learn how to “read” the outdoor space outside your school to implement your academic curriculum in outdoor areas.

For children, STEM pedagogy is an opportunity to develop their social-emotional learning competence (SEL).
While learning how cause and effect, oscillation, kinetic energy, and many other phenomena work through play, children deal with self-awareness, collaboration, inclusion, and the idea of community.

In this PD training, you learn how children can use STEM in sensory, motor, imaginative, and social-emotional learning.

Discover how to use forms, function, force, and motion in young children’s physical and social-emotional development.

Learning Objectives:

• Direct, Practical Implementation
  Through multiple interactive activities, you will learn how to appreciate learning as a physical and emotional act within a “natural” STEM environment you can easily set up in your classroom.
• Language, Emotion, and Science
  You will learn how to use children’s perceptual systems and embodied cognition as a language to introduce multiple conversations related to experiences in STEM.
• Social-Emotional Learning and Physics
  Learn how to combine oscillation, kinetic energy, and other physical phenomena with self-awareness, collaboration, and community.
• Science, Engineering, Math, and Inclusion
  Learn how to set up STEM-based experiences that support every child or student to thrive, ignite a problem-solving culture, and elevate each person’s potential.

A New Professional Development for Early Childhood Educators to Build Confidence with the Reggio Emilia Pedagogical 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.

Learning Objectives:

To really “make sense” of the Reggio approach as educators, we focus on the child and learn how to enter their mind (and body): We embody how children discover, experience, play, and explain the world to themselves daily.

A Deep, Practical Dive into Children’s Minds

This child-centered, introductory professional development training is about (respectfully and professionally) questioning everything children do.
Questioning means:

• Reproducing and analyzing discovery processes,
• Stepping back and observing children in action without judging, prejudging, or anticipating outcomes,
• Listening more than talking.

The Child at the Center

In this new hands-on PD training, educators embody being inside a child’s mind and realize they can learn from children.
Starting from this revelation, they learn to explore how to find a role, a scope, and a lingo to assist and support children’s autonomous learning journeys professionally.

Wondering, Competence, Learning, and Control

The “Making Sense of Reggio“ PD training also involves understanding and building awareness around the impact of adult control on children’s natural learning abilities.
In training, educators learn how to flexibly approach any preschool curriculum, focusing on children’s competence instead of relying on adults’ instructions, plans, and classroom schedules.

Fun, Reward, Team Collaboration

During this professional development, educators learn to see themselves as a team of researchers (“Childhood Researchers,” how cool is that?).

Fun and rewards happen organically every time they learn something new from children as faculty.
As a result, educators build a profound team-collaborative spirit.

1. Are you a school, childcare center, ECE program director, owner, or administrator?
2. Do you believe in children‘s competence?
3. Do you want your staff to finally grasp and implement what you’ve read about (and maybe seen in) Reggio Emilia?

This PD training is for you. Contact us to Learn More!

This PD training is about imagination, listening, and fostering children’s natural ability to tell stories. In this training, we surpass the traditional definition of literacy (”the ability to read and write”) to explore how to support young children in building skills that will bring them to “identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich, and fast-changing world” (UNSECO most recent definition of “literacy”). To reach this goal and learn how to dig into young children’s languages, we use the story as a form of communication and interaction that doesn’t require the ability to read and write. During the training, both facilitator and participants will experience first-hand and in a hands-on way how children constantly invent stories by drawing (graphism and pre-graphism), pretend-playing, interpreting symbols, staging games, daydreaming, observing and listening to the surrounding world, creating new rules and structures, and hearing their voices. We will make up, tell, and listen to stories throughout the whole training session, aiming to discover the children’s art of invention. Learning Objectives:

• Participants will “learn by doing” as many innate techniques children commonly use to invent stories.
• They will learn how to support young children’s imagination and interact in imaginative play “environments.”
• They will learn how to listen to any children’s verbal creative process and how to support them in finding their voice and other forms of expression, especially graphism.
• They will learn new ways to share stories with children beyond reading books out loud.
• They will learn how to construct a story by playfully analyzing the structure of stories.
• Finally, they will learn how to use books non-conventionally as a source to invent new stories.

Teachers and educators often ask me: “Should we teach children those skills, or can they learn them themselves?”   Discover how children’s (0-5) Sensory Perception and Movement impact their Autonomous Learning and Competence. Our approach in this PD training is: “If children do it, we should do it too.” Agenda & Learning Topics:

• Exploring Tactile, Auditory, and Olfactory Systems, their Integration, and Beyond. Activity #1: Resonating Clothing Hangers Activity #2: “The Journey to Standing Up” Activity #3: “Peeling an Orange” Topics: Time perception; stimuli’s intensity; tactile and auditory competence; fine and gross motor skills + imagination; balance and kinesthetics; curiosity and discovery; autonomous learning experiences v. direct instruction.
• Exploring Balance, Sound, Gravity, and Behavior. Activity #4: Body Xylophone (Sensory Integration, Psychomotor Education, Special Needs) Activity #5: “Running and Laughing” Activity #6: Paper Parachute Topics: Proprioception, sensory integration & behavior, overstimulation, self-regulation, elements of psychomotor education, sensory integration through collaborative play
• Learning from Everyone’s Sensory Systems through Play and Movement. Activity #7: “Snowball Fight” Activity #8: “That’s You!” a Body-scheme game Topics: Sensory integration through collaborative play, body scheme and discovery of the individual “form,” embodied cognition, and learning through imitation.

For children, STEM pedagogy is an opportunity to develop their social-emotional learning competence (SEL). While learning how cause and effect, oscillation, kinetic energy, and many other phenomena work through play, children deal with self-awareness, collaboration, inclusion, and the idea of community. In this PD training, you learn how children can use STEM in sensory, motor, imaginative, and social-emotional learning. Discover how to use forms, function, force, and motion in young children’s physical and social-emotional development. Learning Objectives:

• Direct, Practical Implementation Through multiple interactive activities, you will learn how to appreciate learning as a physical and emotional act within a “natural” STEM environment you can easily set up in your classroom.
• Language, Emotion, and Science You will learn how to use children’s perceptual systems and embodied cognition as a language to introduce multiple conversations related to experiences in STEM.
• Social-Emotional Learning and Physics Learn how to combine oscillation, kinetic energy, and other physical phenomena with self-awareness, collaboration, and community.
• Science, Engineering, Math, and Inclusion Learn how to set up STEM-based experiences that support every child or student to thrive, ignite a problem-solving culture, and elevate each person’s potential.

This PD training is about imagination, listening, and fostering children’s natural ability to tell stories. In this training, we surpass the traditional definition of literacy (”the ability to read and write”) to explore how to support young children in building skills that will bring them to “identify, understand, interpret, create, and communicate in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich, and fast-changing world” (UNSECO most recent definition of “literacy”). To reach this goal and learn how to dig into young children’s languages, we use the story as a form of communication and interaction that doesn’t require the ability to read and write. During the training, both facilitator and participants will experience first-hand and in a hands-on way how children constantly invent stories by drawing (graphism and pre-graphism), pretend-playing, interpreting symbols, staging games, daydreaming, observing and listening to the surrounding world, creating new rules and structures, and hearing their voices. We will make up, tell, and listen to stories throughout the whole training session, aiming to discover the children’s art of invention. Learning Objectives:

• Participants will “learn by doing” as many innate techniques children commonly use to invent stories.
• They will learn how to support young children’s imagination and interact in imaginative play “environments.”
• They will learn how to listen to any children’s verbal creative process and how to support them in finding their voice and other forms of expression, especially graphism.
• They will learn new ways to share stories with children beyond reading books out loud.
• They will learn how to construct a story by playfully analyzing the structure of stories.
• Finally, they will learn how to use books non-conventionally as a source to invent new stories.

Documentation mirrors the daily children’s curiosity, ideas, questions, and explorations. As a mirror does, the documentation is there to help children and adults observe, reflect, remember, engage, and develop. Independently from your pedagogical background or school curriculum, learning how to document after Reggio Emilia (the “Best top ten schools in the World” – Newsweek) and using your documentation as the “third teacher” is a game changer for every early childhood educator and your entire school. In this PD training, you will learn how to document and display any children’s adventure, discovery, and learning process. Learning Objectives: Learning how to create a Reggio-Inspired Documentation means:

• Learning how to ask open-ended questions
• Re-learning how to listen to children
• Learning how to organize your teaching time (day, week, and season)
• Learning how to run projects
• Learning how to communicate with parents
• Learning how to self-assess your work