Seventeen years, four classrooms, one big plot twist.
Okay so. How does a girl with a B.A. in elementary and early childhood education end up on stage in front of 3,500 teachers talking about mud? Pull up a tiny chair.
butterfly hill, where it all startedFamily child care, in my own home.
I lasted 10 months. Ten! Family child care is one of the hardest jobs in the whole entire world (I bow down to every single in-home provider out there).
Public school, kindergarten through second grade.
Two years as the support teacher for the kiddos slipping through the cracks in math and reading. It didn’t take long to see the worksheets weren’t working, so we swapped them for games.
Three years in a traditional preschool.
They told me it was play-based. I believed them. Back then I thought play was anything fun, even when it was super teacher-directed and the kids HAD to join in.
We planned those kids minute to minute to minute and almost never got outside (I know. I KNOW.). Behavior issues all day long. I went home with a headache every single night thinking, there has GOT to be a better way. Most of the stories in my book come from these three years.
It’s also where I started digging into real play-based learning, and where I figured out I couldn’t make the changes I wanted to make in that setting.
Butterfly Hill Nature Preschool.
So I took a risk. I started Butterfly Hill with zero of my own dollars: a nonprofit play and nature-based preschool with a forest school, the first in central Minnesota.
Mud pies were gourmet cuisine. Sticks were wands. We read stories under the big tree in full rain gear (that’s us in the polaroid). It’s the most magical place in the world, and I am not even a little bit biased.
Retired from the classroom. Hit the road.
Now I travel to schools and conferences teaching play-based learning, I host The Play Based Learning Podcast, and I wrote a whole book called I’m Not Getting Them Ready for Kindergarten. Plot twist: we ARE getting them ready. We just do it the play way.
