The Play Annex

I'm so excited to let you all know that we will be doing tours from now through summer for a few spots we will have opening up starting in September!
If you have a kiddo who loves to learn through doing, immersing themselves into the materials around them and would like a fabulous community where relationships are at the heart of it all, then this might be the place for you! We learn science, math, reading and writing all through the joy of play. We pride ourselves on meeting each child where THEY are at, celebrating our differences and focusing on social skills that are necessary for life.
Contact us here in messenger or email us at [email protected] to inquire about setting up a tour. For more information on pricing and hours, please visit our website at https://theplayannex.weebly.com/pricinghours.html or message for more info!
We look forward to hearing from you!

We are so honored and grateful to the wonderful families here for nominating us for 2026 childcare/preschool of the year! IF we're winning with our families, we're winning everything!
We love what we do, we love our little community and we thank all the families who come here. We're really proud of what we've built here and thank you for acknowledging us. We feel so seen and appreciated!

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In order to truly understand and love nature and the world we live in, we need to be out in the world we live in. It's only through observing and being amongst the plants and grass and trees, that we deeply get how much a part of it that we are! We're not separate, we are here to take care of it and in return, it also takes care of us.
That's a big reason why we spend as much time outside as we can. We talk about and care for plants in the gardens that are sprinkled liberally throughout our yard. In the second photo, the children are looking at and touching the mint plants that we use to make tea and potions in the summer. I showed them that when they rub their fingers on it, they can still smell the minty scent! We carefully moved leaves to see some of the green shoots coming out around the yard, mindful that there are still creatures sheltering in the piles of leaves. We saw a big spider egg sac in the bark of a tree. We saw the start of the tulips in the corner of my yard that we watch pop up every spring, waiting every day to see if the flowers pop up then waiting patiently for them to open and spread their colorful cheer. We talked about not throwing our trash in the yard, but making sure we throw it or recycle when we can. We also picked up other people's trash too. Because we care for the earth and don't want to leave stuff out that will harm it.
We also talk all the time about caring for each other. We are a community here. We see each other every day and, while we don't have to like each other or play with each other all the time, every day, we do need to find a way to kindly let each other know that. I see their kindness all the time. When one girl fell today, several of the others crowded around to give hugs and ask how they could help. When another girl hurt her hand on the slide, her friend took her by the hand and led her over to an area to doctor her!
Learning to care for the world around us also teaches us to care for ourselves. To listen to our body's rhythms and needs. At our school, everyone brings lunch and snacks from home. This allows the families here to honor what they find valuable in foods and, even more importantly in my opinion, it allows the kids to eat when they want to. It teaches them to listen to their body's hunger cues and stop to feed it. In a world that increasingly provides distractions alongside ridiculous ideas of what one's body "should" look like and when/how to eat to attain this, I feel like starting with a base of listening to what your body needs is SO important.
Lunch and snack times vary throughout the day, but the children have also found that very human capacity for "gathering in the kitchen" for good food and good company. It's very communal and the "water cooler" conversations the kids have in these groups fills my heart with joy and wonder.

I don't do themes. I don't feel the need to impose an adult agenda on children when, if they are given an open environment with open materials and time and freedom to explore, they naturally come up with their own. They also tend to evolve them on their own. My job is to be paying attention and add things to the environment to help facilitate their natural curiosity and wonder.

In this case, the plop I set out was some styrofoam plant thingies someone donated along with some fake flowers that came in a bag of goodies I got from the thrift store. After playing with those, someone asked me if I could get out the stacking flowers. Of course, I could! After watching them do that awhile, I waited for a pause in the play and dropped this statement, "I wonder if I have some creatures that could go in your gardens..." Immediately, they said they would love to have some creatures and started chatting about what kind of creatures as I headed to my backroom to scrounge up some garden creatures. I had a whole bag full of butterflies, bugs, spiders, tiny bunnies and, for some reason, skull rings lol!
This changed the play from building and arranging to imaginative play. I got the table they're playing on in this picture kind of impromptu when our old one broke (more - man I made that table last lol). It is a little tall for some of the kids, but they make it work and while I initially thought maybe I should take it back, I soon discovered that it provided them with a whole new plane of play ...UNDER the table. This is where the imaginative play moved to. Soon there were trains and cars and houses full of bunny families just living their best bunny lives under that table.
I left this set up out for the next day, though I did take apart the flower arrangements and I put the plastic stacking flowers in their container (but still on the table). They came back to it today, but the play immediately focused more on the creatures. One girl was fascinated by the spiders and started asking questions and telling me what she knew about them. We ended up talking about webs and how unique and beautiful they could be. She asked to see some so I pulled them up on my phone and we looked at several. I asked if she would like to make one in her garden. She asked what I had that she could use to make one. I asked her what she thought we could use and she said "yarn or string"! I had some of both. She settled on the purple string and got to work (purple web for a purple spider duh!!). Another boy arrived shortly after her. He really likes spiders and was immediately into setting the spiders up in his flowers. He also wanted to make a web and did! We talked a bit about different kinds of spiders and what bugs we liked and didn't like and just chatted. The kids played with all this before moving into some other play. They were deeply into it so even though I knew I had a spider book they would love, I held off reading it because it is more valuable to me that I don't interrupt the play they find valuable.
After awhile, most the kids decided to eat lunch or have a snack so I asked if they would like me to read to them while they did. They sure did! So I read, "I'm Trying to Love Spiders". They LOVE this book (I'll write more about how I interact with kids during books later) and they were really interested in studying the bugs with magnifying glasses like the book talked about so we paused for everyone to get magnifying glasses to use when I finished reading.
We also ended up watching a short video about jumping spiders cause we were looking at how beautiful different spiders can be and that one was "too cute"!!!
My point here isn't that you should run out and get all the garden and spider stuff so you can set up a "spider theme" for your kids. My point is that when we observe and listen to kids, themes often naturally emerge and we can flow with that in a way that is meaningful and fun for kids. IF we follow their lead. This doesn't necessarily happen every day and it doesn't happen every time I put something out, but it happens a lot and it is beautiful and joyful and full of curious wonder! And that, in my opinion, is the best and most meaningful learning we can experience.

I love building simple, open ended structures like this based off what the kids have shown me they're needing/interested in. I have a few kids here who are super into cars and trucks. Even more are into dumping and pouring and transporting so I wanted to create something that allowed for both at once since my space isn't limitless. This set also helps strengthen core, fine motor and shoulder muscles for writing later, it strengthens tracking skills for reading and the conversation around this table?! Amazing! So much vocab being tossed around, so much collaboration and negotiation, so much imagination and wonder and JOY (the most important element in learning, in my opinion).
This boy in the photos and another child who joined him later were all about the trucks and created a world with those, a world that evolved and changed as their play did. The girls took over later and changed the play completely into a cake factory! All kinds of delightful items were being made for moms and dads and their babies, of course.
Then came the after school kids who turned it into a pet food factory! Their play was very organized and the littles LOVED being a part of it.
One set up, so many different ways to play with it. The beauty of open ended materials. Also, please note, I never once told anyone how to play with anything. I literally put out cars/trucks, wood pellets and the cardboard structures you see here. The rest was up to them!

This times 1000

💡 Kindergarten readiness isn’t just about academics—it’s also about emotional readiness and self-regulation.

We believe in this so much that we wrote a blog post with a free printable detailing the foundational skills kids need BEFORE academics. You can find that here:

https://theinspiredtreehouse.com/the-kindergarten-readiness-skills-your-child-really-needs/

🧠 Skills like managing big feelings, following routines, and calming down when upset are just as important for success in school as academics. Helping kids build these skills early sets the stage for confident, happy learners! 🌟

Image via Planning Playtime - Learning Through Play

This is something so important for both parents and providers/teachers to remember!

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This.

YAAASSS! Please and thank you!

Play is not play just because toys are involved. Real play is freely chosen, self directed and intrinsically motivated. Too often the phrase play based is used to dress up adult led tasks that only look like play from the outside. At Children of the Forest, we create space for the real thing. Comment "sharing" and I will send you a link to my PDF on non judgmental approaches that support authentic play. #ForestSchool #PlayBasedLearning #ChildLedLearning #OutdoorEducation

Something important to remember. I was definitely NOT raised this way and it affected me greatly. I was most often sent to my room after being told my behavior was unacceptable. I also grew up being given the silent treatment for days. The emotional damage was great and it took having children for me to really work through this trauma. I knew I did NOT want my children to feel this way ever and I worked really hard to make sure they didn’t. When I opened this school, it was one of the priorities here. We often get the “bad kids”, kids who get kicked out of other childcares. I have never once thought any of those kids are bad kids. They’ve all been kids who weren’t having their needs met, kids who felt big feelings, but weren’t allowed to, kids who needed to move their bodies in big ways and feel all the big feelings.
Does this mean this is always easy to do? NO! We all have our own hangups and trauma and sometimes, we don’t have it in us and we need to take a little space before we can come back and be there for that child. I think that’s ok because we’re human too. I also think adults have a tendency to talk too much. I think we forget how good it feels to just have someone sit with us and be that safe space next to us. Words can overwhelm, especially when we’re already overwhelmed.

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So good for both parents and providers!

Age 5 (and 6) is extremely concerned with perfection. It's a normal developmental phase.

(Yes, this might also mean that your 4 year old or 4.5 year old or 7 year old are like this. I am describing the peak age at which this phase is typically, generalised across a population, at its most intense.)

Many adults will try to react to perfectionism by doing their best to squash it. They don’t think what they’re doing is squashing, they think it’s encouraging! After all, if the adult themself struggles with perfectionism, or knows people who do, then they can see how damaging of a burden it is to carry for adults.

So if a 5-6yo child gets angry at a drawing and yells, “I didn’t do it right!!”, the adult will tell them something like, “We all make mistakes” or “It looks beautiful to me!” or “You can’t even tell” or “What do you mean, this looks great!”

And if a 5-6yo child tries to learn a new skill—maybe a sport or an activity or a motor skill—and gets frustrated and stomps and screams “I hate this, I can’t learn this, I’m doing it all wrong!” then the adult will tell them something like “But it takes time to learn” and “You have to persevere” and “You were really close” and “You did just fine!”

Imagine if you wrote an important business email, or maybe wrote out your resume, and sent it or submitted it. Then later, when telling your friend or loved one about it, you pulled up the email or resume to show them, and realized it had like five massive typos right in the middle of it.

And they just kept reassuring you "it's fine, it's OK to make a mistake, you still did a great job making this email.”

But all you can see is the typos. And you wonder how it will affect what *might have been*… if you had only been able to get it perfectly the way it was in your mind.

Maybe it does impact what happens as a result of the email/submission, maybe it doesn't, but...it still feels important to you either way and you might not want that feeling to be minimized.

The harder an adult pushes back on this, the harder the adult is saying, “No, the thing you’re concerned about is not actually important in life. No, Goodness and Rightness and Perfection are not actually important. No, this thing you’re putting energy into and caring passionately about doesn’t actually matter.”

(which -- as a side note -- I think has a great deal to do with how it can be "hard to transition" for lots of little kindergarten/first graders or prep/foundations/year 1 or reception/year 1 students. Like, I'll get referrals all the time because "when we transition from writing to maths..." or "when we transition from maths to lunch..." or whatever, the end result is, the kid doesn't get to finish working on what they were working on -- maybe ever. And the adults might be like, "that's no big deal", and they're inadvertently conveying to the kid, "yeah, this is actually just kind of busywork. It doesn't actually matter to me at all if you get the chance to finish this. Yeah you were pouring your heart and soul into trying to write those five words but it turns out four words is fine because you're really just practicing and your end result doesn't matter here."

And in some ways the heart of that *could* be encouraging. It's certainly intended to be good that we're not evaluating or assessing every single little thing our itty-bitties are doing. But in some ways it's also really discouraging. Imagine if, every single task you ever began at work, you knew that (1) you would run out of time to finish it, (2) you would never be given the chance to finish it again or you'd have to do it during your free time, (3) no one would ever review it, look at it, depend on it, or care about it in any way, and actually they might just throw it straight into the trash and then thank you for your work. How long would you feel motivated to *work hard* at that job?)

..but back on topic, that’s not what the adult *means* to be saying. What the adult means to be saying might be more like, “I don’t expect perfection from you! You’re still just a little guy! It’s okay with me if you don’t spell this right, draw this ‘right’, I don’t even have a standard for ‘rightness’ on this in my head. You’re just playing! You’re just learning! It’s okay! I don’t expect the world from you,” but that’s not what the child is hearing.

5-6 is also a peaking time period of a big big shift, where children have typically learned or are typically learning that their words can be just as powerful as their actions. When they’re feeling disappointed or angry they may have begun to reach for the most powerful words that they know, instead of stomping, hitting, throwing, kicking, etc. They use words full of hyperbole and huge extremes. They use words that are as “taboo” and “shocking” as they can imagine. Depending on what they’ve been exposed to, that might include swear words, or “kid swear” words, or shocking themes like death and destruction. “This is the worst ever, I’m going to throw it in the Dumpster, I’m going to set it on fire, I’m going to cut it up with a knife into little pieces,” etc.

And then of course, the harder the adult pushes back on *that*, the more the child continues to feel unheard and misunderstood.

What kind of reply can you offer instead?

What if you just agree with them?

Or just reflect what they’re saying back to them?

Or just empathize with how frustrating it *would* be to be old enough to imagine incredibly cool things like...whole entire movies, and scenery, and people in all their complexity, and fantasy scenes, and and and...and only be able to make your hands make, like, basic shapes and lines? Or to be old enough to have maybe learned some of the basics of reading but not be able to use your hands and your brain to produce whole stories for you to read back later? Or to be old enough to have maybe learned about incredibly cool movements people make with their bodies and sports people participate in and hobbies people have yet have only lived a short amount of time on the earth and not enough time to master ANYTHING yet?

That *is* frustrating!

child: it's not right!!!
you: oh man!! That's so disappointing! (matching their level of energy about it)
child: it never turns out right, I hate it (crumpling the paper, throwing it away)
you: ughhh I know it's so disappointing when you had an idea in your head and it didn't come out that way
child: I'm never drawing again
you: we totally don't have to draw right now. Do you want to do something else? Do you want to just cuddle and feel mad?
child: I always make a mistake when I draw.
you: it feels like it never comes out of your hands like it is in your brain, huh? I bet that's so frustrating.
(etc, etc)

As one final note…I’m not suggesting that you never ever give any kind of messaging about it being okay to make mistakes. I have the book “Beautiful Oops” in my OT room and it’s about how a blotch or a tear or an unexpected mistake on a paper can be turned into its own art, I’m not saying things like that are terrible unhelpful ideas. But like everything else with emotions, they aren’t helpful in the moment when somebody’s emotions are already flooded. Then is not the time to pull out the “everybody makes mistakes” line.

Instead…model coping with your own mistakes. Talk your process out loud. “Ah shoot. I forgot to bring the bag with me today. Now I’m going to have to figure out how to fix this mistake. I’ll drop you off at school and then go back for it.” “Whoops, I was writing the letter u and it came out looking more like a v. That’s okay. I can erase it.” “I spilled this on my shirt. I’m going to do the best I can to get it out with soap but it might not. That’s frustrating, but I know it was just a mistake.” Etc, etc.

It’s a phase. It’s a developmental phase. (Sometimes it's a personality trait. If it is, you'll cross that bridge when you get there -- with a lot of the same supports described in this post -- but also, don't jump to that assumption if they're currently 5-6.)

It’s normal and typical and doesn’t say anything about their long-term perseverance and they won’t learn anything from you trying to enforce your values on them about it. They will learn from experience. They will learn from time and maturity. And they will learn from you modeling it for them.

[Image description: A soft blue, white, and pink bokeh background with bold grey words on top that read, “5-6 is concerned with perfection.” “Perfection” is written in a curly handwriting font. My tag, , is also on the image. End description.]