Professional development your teachers will be talking about for months.

We step back from the rush of modern childhood and ask one question. What happens when we stop?

Press Pause is research and heartfelt stories about uninterrupted, child-led play, and what it builds in a child that nothing else builds. Creativity. Problem solving. The ability to sit with a hard feeling without falling apart.

Kristen makes the case for a slower childhood, the kind most people in the room remember having, and sends teachers back inspired to protect a little more stillness in their own classrooms.

A bold reframe of what it really means to prepare a child for school. Rather than rushing into academics, Kristen believes in getting children ready for kindergarten by letting them fully experience being 3, 4, and 5 years old.

Together we explore the critical role that play, wonder, and child-led exploration have in building the foundation for all future learning. Kristen shares how this approach lines up with children’s developmental needs and actually sets them up for greater success in school, by growing creativity, problem solving, and emotional resilience. We all know the very best way to prepare a child for kindergarten is to let them be exactly the age they are.

It shares a title with her book, so it pairs well with a book table. Books can be brought in for your event at no extra charge. Kristen just needs to know roughly how many you would like at least eight weeks out so she can order and plan ahead.

Say no to everything and eventually nobody comes running. That is the trouble with a reflexive no, and it is exactly why the fable fits.

This session is about saying yes in a different way. Yes to a child’s curiosity. Yes to their wonder. Yes to the need underneath the behavior, which is often as unglamorous as an itchy tag, a full bladder, or a child who does not yet trust the adult in the room.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Most of the time the no has nothing to do with the child. It is about what is inconvenient for us in that moment, and every reflexive no quietly takes a real learning opportunity away.

When children get long, genuinely uninterrupted stretches of play, a surprising number of those behaviors simply fade, because we are finally developing the whole child instead of managing them. Attendees leave knowing how to say yes far more often, and how to make the no that really matters actually land.

But we’ve always done it that way. It is the sentence that ends a conversation about change before it starts, and almost everyone in the room has either said it or had it said to them.

So this session takes it seriously. Calendar time. Weather reports. Letter of the week. Criss-cross applesauce. Kristen brings the research on why letting these traditions go produces a calmer, happier room for the children and for the adults, then sits in the discomfort with the audience instead of standing outside it.

Kristen is speaking from experience here rather than from a podium. She did every single one of them. Calendar time, weather reports, letter of the week, criss-cross applesauce, the lot, and went home with a headache every single day from the sheer amount of control those routines take to run.

Expect honest reflection. Expect some squirming. Expect people to find you afterward and tell you it was the session they needed.

Booking note: best placed after a keynote rather than cold first thing in the morning. It asks a lot of the room.

Literacy learning does not require letter of the week.

Kristen shows how storytelling, sensory play, and a well-built environment grow vocabulary, letter recognition, and phonemic awareness while children are busy doing something they chose.

Attendees leave with specific setups they can build Monday using what is already in the closet.

Early math does not require worksheets or calendar time.

Blocks. Water. Sorting the good rocks from the boring rocks. Kristen shows what a math-rich room looks like and how to name the math already happening in it, which is considerably more of it than most teachers realize.

Number recognition, patterning, comparing, counting, problem solving. All of it underway before anybody plans a lesson.

Flashlights, projectors, light tables, light-up scrunchies, submersible ice cubes.

Kristen connects light to sensory exploration, play schemas, self-regulation, and inquiry, then hands over budget-friendly ways to get it into a room this week.

Attendees walk out with far more light play ideas than a light table, and most of them use materials a program already owns or can pick up cheaply.

Ask ten teachers in one building what play-based learning means and you will get ten different answers, and at least three of them will be a worksheet with stickers on it.

This session fixes that, gently. It is photos and video of real children in real play, and the whole room walks through them together. What is happening here? What is this child working out? Where is the math, the literacy, the negotiation, the risk assessment?

Along the way Kristen covers how much play children genuinely need in a day, what whole child development looks like inside a play-based environment, and the hardest part for most of us, which is letting go of enough control for children to take over their own learning.

Book this one first if your team is not on the same page yet. It is the baseline that makes every other session land.

Somewhere along the way outside became recess. Twenty minutes, a jungle gym, a whistle, and back in we go.

Kristen built a nature and forest school, so she has spent years watching what happens when the outdoors gets treated as a classroom instead of a break from one. This training makes the case for why outdoor play is necessary for growth and development rather than a reward for finishing the real work, and then gets practical about how to get there.

Most programs are working with a commercial playground and a fence, and that is fine. You do not need acres of woods. The session walks through what you can add to the space you already have, the kind of open-ended materials and provocations that turn a flat playground into somewhere children get curious, take risks, and wonder out loud.

The goal is simple. Give children back the outdoor time most of us had as kids, and stop apologizing for how much of it they need.

Rotating between a math center, a science center, and a literacy center is the default in early childhood. This workshop puts something more powerful in their place.

For the first stretch, attendees are inside real play setups Kristen builds in the room. The adults actually get to play, and they have an absolute blast doing it, which is not something most of them have done in a professional development session before.

Then the detective hats go on and the group works together to name the math, science, literacy, and social learning that just happened in front of them, which turns out to be most of the standards they were worried about missing.

Three hours is the version Kristen recommends, though it can be tightened to two if your schedule is packed. This is one of her own favorites and the workshop she gets asked for most. It is the session people describe afterward as the one that changed how they see their own classroom.

Play gets dismissed because it does not produce a worksheet, or any other tangible receipt for the learning that just happened. This workshop fixes the documentation problem instead of arguing about it.

Attendees get to know their own state’s early learning benchmarks, then apply them to real video of real children playing. They practice naming the learning out loud, and they practice writing it down in a form an administrator or a parent will actually accept.

Book this one when your teachers already love play and cannot yet defend it.

It starts with an ordinary object in your hands. Kristen hands out random items and asks the room to come up with fifty different ways a child might use that one thing in play. Fifty ways a child would actually use it, rather than fifty teacher-directed activities. It is harder than it sounds, and it wakes up creativity most adults have not stretched in years.

Then the cabinet comes out. Kristen travels with a cabinet of open-ended materials and goes through it piece by piece, though not to tell you what anything is for. That is the point. A wooden block is the original loose part, and in a child’s hands it becomes a cell phone, an ice skate, a hamburger, a walkie-talkie. A plastic toy hamburger will pretty much always be a plastic toy hamburger.

So the work here is getting into a child’s brain instead of an adult’s, and seeing how the most random materials, the ones you would never think of as play materials, become the catalyst for enormous amounts of creativity and learning. A photo showcase of many more loose parts follows, all things you could start collecting tomorrow.

The last stretch is play schemas. What they are, how to spot them, and exactly what to add to your environment to support each one. Once you can name a transporting schema you stop calling it a mess.

Preschool art should look like curiosity rather than conformity. Twenty identical paper plate turkeys are not an art program.

Kristen makes the developmental case first. How open-ended art builds creativity, executive function, problem solving, confidence, and motor development, and why crafts quietly limit thinking. When children are free to explore materials their own way, they take risks, test ideas, communicate feelings, and express themselves in ways no adult-led craft ever captures.

Then it gets practical. How to set up invitations that honor children’s natural curiosity, how to support exploration without over-directing, and how to handle materials, setup, and classroom flow, because the mess is the reason most teachers quit trying.

There is a hands-on component built in, where attendees stop listening and actually make their own art. Process art, the real kind, with no right answer waiting at the end of it.

This one starts before circle time even happens. How do you set up a morning that actually fits what children need, with the fewest possible transitions, since transitions are the hardest part of a young child’s day? How do you build community in the morning without defaulting to a morning meeting?

From there, Kristen says goodbye to the YouTube good morning song, calendar time, and the weather chart nobody in the room is invested in, and brings circle time back to what it was supposed to be. A short, joyful gathering that respects the attention span of an actual three-year-old.

Her favorite read-alouds. Old-school finger plays and movement songs. How to build a story basket, plus a pile of ideas for making your own. If circle time currently feels more like crowd control than connection, this is the permission slip to do it differently.

Somewhere along the way we became dot-dot-not-a-lot teachers, rationing glue by the drop and calling it a lesson in responsibility. It was never about the glue. It was about control.

This workshop is Kristen’s case for saying yes to glue play, and it gets very practical very quickly. How children learn for themselves what too much glue feels like. How to contain the mess so it fits what you can actually cope with. How to set up a glue table or a dedicated glue space without blowing your materials budget, and how to make a glue stash stretch much further than you think.

Underneath it all is the bigger conversation about where adult need for control shows up in our work with children, usually without us noticing, and what it costs them.

Hands-on throughout, and every attendee leaves with the Free the Glue ebook, packed with ideas and materials to use straight away.

Children build weapons out of sticks. They smash block towers like a tiny demolition crew. They hold a funeral for the doll that did not make it. Then the adults freeze, redirect, and whisper it to each other across the room. Is this okay?

Those weird, wild, faintly unsettling moments are essential. They are how children process risk, power, mortality, and destruction, all the things we usually keep locked up tight. This session is a permission slip to get curious about the Big Five instead of panicky: risky play, weapon play, rough and tumble, death and dying play, and violent or destructive play.

Kristen covers why each one is developmentally appropriate and necessary, then gets practical about supporting it inside real boundaries, including the public school no-weapon-play reality and exactly what to do instead.

Here is what makes the in-person version different. Attendees do the teaching. The room splits up and teaches each other through skits, puppet shows, game shows, and collaborative art pieces. Nobody sits and listens for two hours, and nobody forgets what they taught.