Wolf & Rowan Childcare

We’ve been taking it slow over here! ☀️

Lots of water. Lots of yogurt popsicles 😂 Windows closed during the hottest part of the day. Quiet invitations to play when it feels too warm to be running around outside.

I always find it interesting how the rhythm changes during a heatwave. The play almost seems to softens a little.

Hoping everyone is staying cool and finding little pockets of calm this week. 💜

I don’t think I really remember what anyone “made” that afternoon but I know I will remember the laughter for a long time. This memory is auditory for sure.

One little “Ooooo…wiggly” was all it took for an idea to ripple through the group. The playdough was never about creating something. It became about sharing laughter and joy, trying an idea, and building on one another’s thinking. It became raw authentic connection.

It’s moments like these that remind me to look beyond the finished product. (What even is finished? Nothing ever is! Why, as adults, are we so focused on products and finality?) The richest learning isn’t what children make. It’s how they influence each other and the other people around them along the way.

This moment has stayed with me.

It reminded me that so much of my work is noticing my own instinct to step in. Not because children don’t need us, but because sometimes what they need most is an adult who believes they’re capable enough to stay close without taking over.

I’m learning that confidence isn’t something we hand to children. It’s something that grows when they experience themselves doing hard things, knowing someone is there if they need them.

That’s a reflection I’ll be carrying with me for a while.
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This quote from ECPN’s article Pedagogical Narrations: Pedagogical Processes and Curricular Trajectories reminds us that pedagogical narrations are part of the intellectual, ethical, and collective work of early childhood education. They make visible that ECE is not only caregiving work but also pedagogical work shaped by commitments, responsibilities, and ongoing processes of thinking together.

How have pedagogical narrations shaped your practice and your perception of early childhood educators?

Read the journal entry at ecpn.ca:https://ecpn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/ECEBC-Journal-Winter-2025-web.pdf

This month, we are recommending Disrupting and Countering Deficits in Early Childhood Education, edited by Fikile Nxumalo and Christopher P. Brown.

This edited collection challenges the deficit-oriented discourses that often shape early childhood education, including narratives that frame children and families in terms of gaps, risks, or presumed lack.

The book invites educators, researchers, and students to consider how deficit logics are produced and how early childhood education might move toward more democratic, responsive, and justice-oriented practices. Across the chapters, contributors foreground the knowledge, histories, experiences, and capacities children and families already bring to early learning spaces.

This book offers an important invitation to reconsider how we describe children, families, and communities, and what becomes possible when early education rejects deficit framings and instead works from complexity, dignity, and possibility.

I watched this tower fall more times than I could count. There were tears followed by snuggles. There were moments when the frustration felt very, very big.

And then I witnessed the return!

So often we rush to help when a child becomes frustrated. Yet some of the richest learning happens in that space between “this isn’t working” and “I’m ready to try again.”

Not because frustration is the goal but because children are incredibly capable when they’re given support, connection, and the time they need to work through something difficult.

The tower standing was never the goal. The returning was! 💜