FGC Early Childhood

Happy Holidays from Teacher Prep!
Wishing you a joyful season filled with rest, inspiration, and all the magic that comes with shaping future minds.

Yesterday was graduation! We are so proud of our graduates!!

YES!!! It is ok if they don't want to go to the Blocks! It is ok if they want to stay in the blocks all day! When we dictate where children go, or when they go there, we are taking away their autonomy and stifling their play AND learning!

“How do you make sure children play in each area of provision each week?”

You don’t.
Because play is not a tick-list. ✨

In a gentle, heart-led approach, we slow down and protect play. We don’t direct children around the room or ask them to collect experiences. We trust their instincts, their fascinations and their natural drive to learn through play.

🌿 What would Scandinavian children do?
In Nordic settings, children choose where they play — and stay there for long, unhurried stretches. It’s totally normal to spend the whole morning outdoors building dens, digging, climbing or cooking mud soup with friends.
They’re not rotated. They’re respected.

Play isn’t seen as a break from learning — it is learning. In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, long chunks of uninterrupted free play are protected daily because the outcomes speak for themselves: wellbeing, confidence, problem-solving, independence, social strength.

🌿 Children don’t learn in compartments.
One rich moment of child-led play can cover multiple EYFS areas naturally.

A child building a fox den outside isn’t just doing “construction”. They’re:
📐 exploring space & measure • 🗣 building language • 🤝 negotiating roles • 💪 using gross motor strength • 🌍 drawing from stories & nature knowledge

All woven together — joyfully, without adult rotation.

🌿 Research backs this up.
EPPE highlights deep involvement and sustained shared thinking.
NAEYC (2022) reminds us:

“Free play… encourages children’s initiative, independence and problem-solving.”

And as Dr Peter Gray says:

“Play is not a break from learning — it is learning.”

When we stop chasing checklists and start trusting the process of play…
✨ Children flourish
✨ Behaviour softens
✨ Curiosity deepens
✨ Learning becomes authentic

This is the heart of Hygge in the Early Years™ — warm, connected, child-centred practice rooted in trust. 🌿

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🌟 Ready to bring this Scandinavian-inspired approach into your setting?
Join me inside Hygge in the EY™ — where we blend Nordic pedagogy, wellbeing and play into transformational training.

👉 Find out more at www.hyggeintheearlyyears.co.uk

Early Childhood is Neuroscience, Not Handprint Crafts.

Don't get us wrong...

Handprints are super sweet.
They’re truly sentimental.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with capturing one once or twice a year to remember how small their hands once were.

But what’s happening now goes far beyond that.

In so many classrooms, handprint crafts are being mass produced for every holiday, weekly theme, and event. These are not learning experiences. The child’s only role is getting their hand pressed into paint while the adult does the rest, adding decorations, details, and even “quotes” to the finished product. What’s left behind isn’t learning, it’s a display of adult effort and approval.

All of this burns valuable time and materials that could be used to offer real, brain-building experiences. The hours spent creating “ cute projects” could be spent exploring, experimenting, and discovering. The paints, papers, and tools could serve genuine sensory play and scientific inquiry.

If we want early childhood education to be taken seriously, we have to stop leading with what’s cute and start prioritizing what’s meaningful. When classrooms are filled with crafts children aren’t truly creating, we overshadow the deep and powerful work of early development.

And if capturing a handprint once or twice a year was all it was, this wouldn’t even be a topic for discussion. But when these prints fill classrooms year-round, it’s time to have the conversation and raise the bar.

Join us for our upcoming webinar, “Rethinking Early Learning: More Than Crafts and Worksheets,” where we’ll explore how to shift from product-focused activities to authentic, brain-aligned experiences that truly honor how children learn. (Nov 26, 2025 12:00 PM EST)

FREE REPLAY FOR EVERYONE WHO SIGNS UP!

Join for FREE: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DfJ26HjERJSlS4BOhSgQ8w #/registration

Get CERTIFIED: https://www.weskoolhouse.com/store-webinars

Process Vs. product!!!

If Every Piece Looks the Same, It Wasn’t Theirs to Begin With.

Walk into many early childhood classrooms and you’ll see a familiar sight... rows of identical art projects. Twenty penguins with the same cotton-ball belly. Twenty suns with exactly eight rays. Twenty perfectly traced rainbows in the exact same color order.

To an untrained eye, this may look like success. But what it actually reveals is that every child followed the same adult-led instructions to reach a pre-determined outcome (And let's not forget how much work the adult did compared to the child).

That isn’t creativity. That’s compliance.

When we give children a model and ask them to copy it step-by-step, the thinking has already been done for them. There is no real decision-making, no problem-solving, and no opportunity to explore. The child’s job becomes ex*****on instead of expression.

Now picture a different approach... Children are offered the same materials (paper, scissors, paint, etc) but no final example to replicate. One child makes a swirling abstract pattern. Another creates something that looks like a face. A third mixes colors just to see what happens. Every piece is different because every child brought their own ideas, choices, and perspective into the process.

That is what learning looks like.

Children are already spending much of their day following directions—cleaning up, lining up, washing hands, transitioning between activities. Instruction has its place, but if we want children to become thinkers, they need consistent opportunities to make decisions. And the only way to learn how to make decisions is by making them.

Open-ended art is one of the most powerful ways to support that growth. It invites experimentation, risk-taking, and reflection. It allows children to try, revise, and discover what works for them. When every piece looks the same, what we’re really displaying isn’t the child’s work. It’s ours.

Real learning leaves room for mistakes, surprise, and difference. If the walls are full of matching projects, we’re not celebrating creativity. We’re replacing it.

Congratulations to all of our graduates!! We LOVE graduation day!!

Happy Teacher Appreciation Week! We want to celebrate both our faculty members and our graduates who are making a difference in the lives of students here at FGC, in Florida, and around the world. Thank you for all you do inside and outside of the classroom!