Monday February 16 – Heather Bernt Santy -Play Skeptics Have Schemas, Too!
What do we need to do to persuade play skeptics so they will join us in ghting for the child’s right to play? In a perfect world, adults everywhere would agree that children’s lives should be lled with play simply because it is a human right. In our imperfect world, some adults hold values that make play seem frivolous or that too much play will set children up for failure. The good news is that we can work to understand the schemas that skeptics use to view play and then tailor our advocacy stories to expand their schemas! How can we use play stories to persuade skeptics?
Tuesday, February 17 – Michael Kamen, Alicia Moore, Marilyn Nicol – Healing Through Play, Stories, and Literature: Supporting Children’s Grief, Loss, and Resilience in Early Childhood Classrooms
Grief touches even our youngest learners, whether through the loss of a loved one, separation, or incarceration. In this hands-on session, you’ll discover how to harness the children’s natural drive to play and the power of play to support emotional healing. We will explore age-appropriate literature, dramatic play, block and puppet centers, and loose-parts explorations that encourage connection and recovery. You will also learn to use hands-on experiences that help children move through grief’s stages. Grounded in trauma-informed principles, these strategies seamlessly integrate into your daily routines. Leave with curated book lists, lesson plans, and SEL prompts as tools for guiding young children through loss and toward resilience and hope.
Wednesday, February 18 – Sharon Peck – The Power of Play for Educators and Advocates: Cultivating Joy and Resilience
Play is a child’s fundamental right, but what about the educators, therapists, and advocates who dedicate their lives to fostering playful environments? In this interactive session, participants will explore how embracing a playful mindset enhances resilience, strengthens advocacy, and nurtures joy in both personal and professional spheres. Through hands-on activities, re ective discussions, and practical strategies, attendees will uncover their own fun and joy invitations, learning how to incorporate playfulness into their work to inspire lasting change.
Goals include:
- Identify the role of playfulness in sustaining joy and resilience among educators and advocates.
- Discover personal “joy invitations” and strategies for integrating a playful mindset into professional practice.
- Explore concrete tools for advocating for play through an energized and engaged presence.
- This session will blend storytelling, group re ection, improvisation, collaboration, and hands-on play experiences.
- Participants will engage in practical exercises designed to reignite their passion for play and advocacy, leaving with actionable techniques for maintaining a joyful, resilient approach in their work.
Thursday, February 19 – Mike Huber- The Power of Pretend Play: How you can support young children’s power, identity, and agency through play
Children’s play often tells a story of power through the roles they choose to play: exercising power over, power with, or power for peers, adults, or phenomena from the wider world. Allowing and supporting these types of play, even when they may make you uncomfortable, is key to fostering children’s agency, self-e cacy, self-regulation, and sense of connection. Join author and early childhood play advocate Mike Huber in this session, where you will learn practical strategies you can use with young children to support this sense of power in pretend play and in real ways.
In this inspiring and practical session, you will learn how pretend play allows children to practice executive function skills at a slightly more mature level than they might otherwise, or as child development theorist Lev Vygotsky put it, when children play, they are “a head taller.” You will discover that when children immerse themselves in a character, they tend to stay regulated longer, maybe because they are slightly disassociated from themselves—“I’m not Mike, I’m Omega Supreme.” Children are emotionally regulated even as they embody characters who are in con ict. They are playing out the emotions while not experiencing them. This allows them to use mental exibility rather than getting stuck in a dysregulated state as they might if it were an actual conflict.
Play fighting may worry us as adults, thinking that children are learning to solve issues by fighting. Still, it can have the exact opposite result, as it improves their executive functioning. We do a disservice to children if we think of them as powerless. Perhaps they are when we view them from our adult world. But if we glimpse inside
the world of their imagination, we can see their power is boundless, not in some distant future, but right here, right now, if we only take the time to look. Join Mike to discover the power in pretend.
Friday, February 20 – Michele Pullen – Ready for Me
Ready for Me is a Defending the Early Years arts campaign. The campaign engages children and adults in a conversation about readiness for kindergarten, including the notion that schools need to be ready for children- Ready for ME. The campaign encourages others to participate in their communities as a way to engage and connect while changing the narrative about going to kindergarten!