By Kay Erikson, Teacher, and Chia-wa Yeh, Head Teacher and Research Coordinator
"We’re back!” Adria Taha-Resnick, president of the California Association of Education of Young Children (CAAEYC), joyfully announced at the start of the keynote during the CAAEYC conference. Held in Santa Clara over three days in April, the conference drew over 1,500 early childhood educators—including Bing teachers Kay Erikson and Chia-wa Yeh and doubling the total number of attendees in 2022. The energy in the room was palpable, as teachers and administrators gathered to gain insights from this year’s theme: “Inspiring Curiosity and Exploration.” The conference offered nearly 150 workshops on a broad range of topics, from the latest in neuroscience to exploring developmentally informed environments.
Sally Haughey, founder of Fairy Dust Teaching, an online platform with over a quarter million followers, kicked off the conference with a keynote titled “Bringing Back the Fire.” After addressing the challenges early childhood educators continue to face as a result of the pandemic, she delivered a rousing speech advocating for the power of play. Sharing personal stories from her early years as teacher, she eloquently illustrated how play can strengthen relationships, ignite passion, and bring back joy.
Play was a throughline for a significant number of workshops at this year’s conference, one of which was titled “It’s Not Just Play: Articulating the Importance of Play to Parents.” Presented by Bev Hartman, Bing’s former assistant director, together with Janet Vanides, an early childhood educator, the workshop shared a framework articulating the value of what children learn through play. Using open-ended design materials to illustrate why play is important, attendees were given a small bag of materials and challenged to create something from the contents in five minutes. It quickly became evident that this “MacGyver” exercise called on critical thinking, communication and collaboration, and creativity—just some of the skills children need to develop and thrive in the 21st century. Workshop attendees left having completed a creative and fun exercise—and having developed their own “statement of play” they could use to articulate the value of children’s play to others. Reflecting on their “play history,” educators discussed modern influences and generational changes that can impact children’s play. Hartman asked, “What is play?” and invited participants to consider a number of thought leaders, like Betty Jones, who have written extensively on children’s play. Quoting Jones, Hartman said, “Young children learn the most important things not by being told, but by constructing knowledge for themselves in interaction with the physical world, and the way they do this is by playing.”
Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski, co-authors of When You Wonder, You’re Learning: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids, shared key principles from Fred Rogers’ legacy hosting Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. In the second keynote of the conference, “When You Wonder, You’re Learning,” they presented recent evidence that continues to support what Rogers promoted decades ago, such as the importance of connection-building, creativity, and curiosity that were the hallmarks of the Neighborhood program.
To nurture children’s creativity, Rogers would introduce children to guests who love what they do—from cellist Yo-Yo Ma and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to everyday people—to share what brings them joy. Rogers would also regularly engage in painting, cutting construction paper, and building projects that some adults might consider childish, but he made a point of telling children how much he enjoyed those activities. Such enthusiasm is contagious and can spark children’s desire to try out for themselves what they see others enjoying.
Rogers also encouraged curiosity, modeling how eager he was to learn about the world. He’d show videos of how materials were made (e.g., crayons, spoons) and, in one instance, featured a guest who played music using two spoons. And in his song “Did You Know?,” he would sing, “Did you know? Did you know? Did you know that it’s all right to wonder?…Did you know that when you wonder, you’re learning?…We learn so much by wondering.”
The speakers shared several insightful quotes from Rogers. Among them: “It’s what you bring to the children every day—your listening, your caring, your enthusiasm, and your responding to their ideas, thoughts, and feelings—that encourages and inspires children to ask questions and to be imaginative. By responding thoughtfully to children’s questions…you’re encouraging their curiosity. Even when you don’t know the answer, you’re letting them know it’s good to wonder and ask.”
Behr and Rydzewski also referenced The House of Make-Believe: Children’s Play and the Developing Imagination by psychologists Dorothy and Jerome Singer, sharing four basic elements for fostering creativity: 1) an adult who inspires, encourages, and joins in children’s play; 2) a dedicated “sacred space” for that play; 3) unstructured play time; 4) simple objects that enrich the imagination. Our practice at Bing utilizes all these elements.
Bing’s music and movement specialist, Mara Beckerman, presented on the last day of the conference. Her high-energy workshop, “The Power of Creative Movement: Easy, Fun Activities That Build Strength, Focus, Confidence, Creativity, Rhythm, Communication, and Community,” had the participants singing and dancing for 90 minutes. Starting with warm-up activities, Beckerman shared various movement activities based on patterns that naturally occur during the first two years of a child’s life. These included cross-lateral movement (moving across the body), core distal movement (small and closed to big and open), and vestibular movement (swinging). Then attendees learned dance concepts like space, body, time, and force to consider integrating when working with young children. The scarf dance was an exuberant activity that put theory into practice as attendees were challenged to explore different ways of waving scarves in the air. Beckerman’s workshop included additional movement exercises like the teapot dance, a clever twist on the song “Polly Put the Kettle On.” “It’s important for children to learn how to move their bodies,” Beckerman shared, and by the end of 90 minutes, educators had learned a host of imaginative ways to help them do just that.
“Play is the powerhouse that drives development,” shared Sally Haughey in her keynote address, and “underneath play is passion.” There was no shortage of play or passion among the attendees and presenters at the CAAEYC conference. With the field of early childhood education entering a unique period, as we welcome children from “Gen C” or Generation COVID into our classrooms, now more than ever, to support both children and educators, “the answer is play.”