Early childhood expert Kisha Reid joins Janet in a lively conversation about the often overlooked and underestimated benefits of play-driven learning and how we can nurture these lifelong gifts for our children. Kisha and Janet discuss the magic of trusting children to discover and develop their passions and how our fears, misperceptions, and impatience as parents can get in their way. Reid weighs in on how to balance free play with lessons, sports, and other extracurriculars and whether parents should be concerned about summer learning loss. She also shares how in the early stages of her career she went against the grain by pioneering her play-based approach in traditional preschool environments.: “I was that teacher that everybody else looked at like, ‘What is wrong with her? She can’t control her class.’” Reid describes how she accommodates neurodiverse children in her program and her belief overall that “we need to shift the measuring tool that we use for some of our assessments of young children so that it’s inclusive of values and more diverse things.”

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