Being “Right Here Right Now” with children is one of the most challenging and impactful things a caregiver can do. In this episode of The Playvolution HQ Podcast, Jeff explores the challenges of staying present while juggling responsibilities and why it’s crucial for fostering meaningful connections with kids. He also critically examines flashcards, offers tips for observing children’s communication skills, and dives into how familiarity bias can cloud our perspective of a child’s world. Plus, stick around for the Dad Joke of the Week!

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0002 Right Here Right Now

Episode Notes

• Large Blocks Of Uninterrupted Time | Core Value 1
• Top 10 Books For Understanding The Value Of Child-Led Play And Exploration
• The 5 Best Reasons To Ditch Flashcards
• Free Forms | Communicative Development Observation Form
• Familiarity Bias
• Observation Forms
• Early Learning Glossary

The Right Here Right Now Transcript

Hey, welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. Thanks for pushing play. I’m Jeff Johnson.

On with the show. Alright, so first up, I got to make a correction. At the very end of the last episode, I mentioned kind of as we were as the outro music was playing, I mentioned to, I said Jasper, Jasper, that wasn’t too bad, was it? Or something like that.

Now the thing is, I was supposed to say Jeeves because I misspoke and called Jeeves Jasper. Now Jeeves is the PlayvolutionHQ podcast intern. That isn’t his or her real, real name.

We’ll get into more of that in a future episode. He or she wants to be anonymous. Jasper is my coffee shop name.

And Jeeves, kind of my butler when it comes to the podcast and some PlayvolutionHQ stuff. So that means Jeeves often stops and gets my my hot chocolate for me on the way to the studio. And so sometimes I confuse Jeeves and Jasper and it was a big mistake.

And look, Jeeves, I apologize. I’m sorry. I will try never to call you Jasper again.

You’re much appreciated for the hard work you do on the show. So moving on, topic one, core values part two. So last week we talked about how kids need big blocks of uninterrupted time for self-directed play and exploration.

I think the second core value of this show and the PlayvolutionHQ website, and I think early learning, should be that the caregiver’s job is to be right here right now. Present in the moment is what I’m talking about. And that’s really hard to do because life comes at you fast.

You’ve got a lot of responsibilities. People are depending on you. Your mind is all over the place.

So being here and now is a challenge. And it’s what the kids need most. Young children need attentive adults.

The younger the children, the more attentive we should be. We should not be preparing for the next thing on the schedule. And sometimes it seems like as soon as you start a thing with kids, your mind is already on the thing or the thing after that.

And you have a hard time being here and now. We shouldn’t be wondering if Gwen used a tone with us yesterday. Because we replay that stuff in our heads a lot of times.

And we pick nits out of past conversations and experiences. And those things pull us out of the present. We shouldn’t be dreaming of the weekend.

Even if it’s gonna be a great weekend. Even if we really, really need the weekend, we need to be right here right now. But again, our mind pulls us in that direction a lot of the times.

We shouldn’t be fretting about school readiness. It’s not about whether these three-year-olds can do blah blah blah blah blah that makes them school ready. It’s about what can I do for them to make this environment we’re in right now more supportive of where they are developmentally right here and right now.

We shouldn’t be thinking about the paperwork that needs our attention. And it seems like over the last couple decades, there gets to be more and more paperwork. And it is more of an attention grabber from caregivers and pulls them away from being in the moment.

Look, achieving this right here right now experience, 100% of the time, is 100% impossible. It can’t be done. And all of those things I just said we shouldn’t be doing, I’ve done them way more than I should have in my career.

It’s challenging. It’s hard. But the more we can be right here and right now in the present moment with kids, the better off we are.

So a little bit more here and a little bit more now is doable. Maybe we get to 80% instead of 100%. Maybe we get to 85% instead of 100%.

Maybe if you’re at 40% now and you get to 50%, that’s a big change. But start looking for those opportunities to be more here and now in the moment with the kids in your care. Topic two, the five best reasons to ditch flashcards.

I can’t think I teased this in the last episode. We’re gonna go over here. This is a post together I put together for the Playvolution HQ site.

It’s called the five best reasons to ditch flashcards. And we really kind of get into them there. I’m just gonna go through them fairly quickly for you here.

You can check out the article. It will be in the episode links on the show notes. So the five flashcard problems are one, there’s a developmental mismatch.

Flashcards, for example, tend to be relatively stationary and kids tend to be active. And their brains prefer to be up and moving and active. And flashcards are kind of about rote memorization and sedentary activity.

And kids are about handling and being interactive with the world. And look, if you’re gonna learn about the color red, being exposed to red crayons and red Hot Wheel cars and red Play-Doh and red balls and bumping into red out in the world, red apples, red strawberries, they’re gonna learn the color red. You don’t need flashcards to do that.

Flashcards often lack context. The things the flashcards are quizzing kids about don’t always and often don’t line up with children’s developmental levels. They might, knowing what blue is, when they haven’t heard of blue before, because they haven’t experienced blue enough, is kind of taxing on them.

And then you get into letters and numbers with especially really young kids, two and three and four year olds, a lot of time their life experience doesn’t have a lot of context for what the cards are quizzing them about. There’s an overemphasis on academics. Flashcards tend to focus and rush towards academics a little bit.

And in a world where we need to slow down this rush and be right here right now, pushing the formal academic learning is kind of not a best choice for kids. And then they also miss opportunities for holistic development. Kids are active learners and they’re made to be up and moving, engaging.

The learning that results from flashcard drills is limited at best, memorization of basic information. And that’s kind of a missed opportunity when they could be having full body experiences, working on sensory integration and those kind of things. And then also flashcards kind of limit creativity and critical thinking.

You don’t have to, there’s not a lot of critical thinking in flashcarding. There’s a lot of memorization, there’s not a lot of creativity. I think, well, what’s the memory? I think I was quizzed, I had flashcards, there was like a green crayon, and I said crayon, and I was supposed to say green, and I got it wrong.

Because I wasn’t, again, I didn’t have that context, but I was thinking differently than they wanted me to think, because flashcards are very limited in the kind of responses they want. Beyond that, some of the myths about flashcards is, one, there’s a lot of learning involved. There’s not, there’s a lot of maybe memorization, which is kind of very low- level learning.

If you want to get into some more learning, being active and engaged and playful is your best choice. They’re convenient, affordable, and not messy, which is really true, but loose parts are convenient and affordable as well. They are a little bit messy, but the mess is worth the learning.

And the learning is a lot stickier with up and active learning, because the children are engaging their whole bodies and more of their sensory systems than they do with flashcards, and that just makes the information more sticky. And then finally, flashcards help build memory skills. And look, maybe to a point, but so does real play, kids up and being active in the world.

So flashcards really lose out. Now, if I’ve managed to sway you a little bit on flashcards, and you’ve got a stack of them sitting around, don’t throw them away. Turn them into loose parts.

They are delightful for loose parts. Kids can use them in craft activities, you can put them in the dramatic play area, and they’ll use them for restaurant menus and other things like that. They’ll figure out things to do with them that are more creative, and sadly, or no, joyfully, more full of learning than their designed intention.

So that’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about ditching flashcards. Back here and on to topic three of this episode, observing communication. This is something else I teased at the end of the last episode.

So let’s go back to the interwebs here. So this is a form I put together a couple months ago for the Playvolution HQ website. It’s a communicative development observation form, and the link will be in the show notes.

Basically, this thing is supposed to help you capture a snapshot of where a child is in their development of communication skills, and it’s pretty simple. We just go here for, this is just a look at it. It prints out a normal office paper.

Basically, you can fill out the top information, date, the name of the child, observed, where you’re doing the observation, and who’s doing the observation, and then anybody else involved in the conversation. And there’s space for a quick recap of the conversation that you observed, and then some questions. Things like who initiated the communication, what verbal interactions were observed, what was the quality of vocal expression, how much eye contact did the child make, things like that.

And there’s just preset selections you can make there. This is kind of a quick way of capturing a fair amount of information. And then next to that are spaces for some reflection.

Things about what kind of gestures and facial expressions were used, strengths in the child’s communication, challenges in the child’s communication that could maybe use improvement, and other notes you might have. And look, doing this weekly for every child in your program might be a challenge. Maybe filling out this kind of observation for everybody in the classroom once every month or two might be interesting.

If you’re a parent of a homeschooling child, starting on something like this when they were an infant and doing it every month or two, while they’re in their early years, and then going back and looking at them, you really will notice the evolution of their communicative skills. And the form is designed to catch body language and facial expressions, which are forms of communication, as well as verbal communication. So it’s useful for even nonverbal kids.

And it’s just a tool out there. There are a bunch of observation forms over at the Playvolution HQ website. There will be a link, of course, in the show notes.

What do we got coming up next? Oh, yeah. So it’s just a snapshot of children’s current abilities and identifying and documenting concerns. That’s the other thing you can use that form for.

If you’ve got concerns about where a child is in their communication development, maybe doing that observation a few times with them will help you maybe catch things you were missing and maybe verify or disprove your concerns about where they are developmentally. Moving on, topic four, our final one for this episode, familiarity bias. This is something I wanted to get into a little bit.

So familiarity bias, my tongue trips over it, is basically, and there’s a post at the Playvolution HQ site, again, a link in the show notes. Familiarity bias is a tendency to overlook, undervalue, or take things we’ve encountered many times for granted. When something becomes part of our daily lives, whether it’s a routine, a space, or a process, it loses its novelty and fades into the background of our awareness.

And look, for us adults, this is kind of a mental shorthand. If you were walking around as a 45-year-old and everything you encountered every day was as brand new as it is to a two-year-old, it would make it kind of hard to get through your day. So this is just something our brain does to speed up our ability to function and devote mental attention to other things.

It can increase our efficiency and reduce mental effort. So it’s good for us adults, but the problem is familiarity bias often clouds our understanding of just how new, amazing, and unpredictable the world can be in the eyes of a child. We get kind of cloudy eyes, and that can be a problem when we’re trying to be right here right now, in the moment with kids, because we do things like overlook newness.

You run into a big, juicy caterpillar on the playground, and you’re like, oh, a caterpillar. I’ve seen a million of them. And this might be the the first time a child has been this close to a caterpillar, and it’s brand new, and fresh, and amazing.

And so we overlook those kind of things. Sunsets maybe aren’t as amazing to us as they used to be, because we’ve seen so many of them. Rushing through moments.

Because we’ve got this shorthand in our brain, things that children are interested in, or that take children more time, or things that children want to hover on, kind of are rushed through sometimes for adults. Things like just putting on their shoes, or picking up toys, or going for a walk with a toddler. A lot of times adults on walks with toddlers, their goal is to get the child through the course of the walk, and move on to the next thing.

The child wants to stop every four steps, and look at something. Pick up a stick, or examine a flower, or listen to a dog bark, or whatever it is. We need to often, when we can, slow down in these moments, and enjoy them a little bit more, instead of rushing through them.

Months and months ago, I saw a dad out walking with a toddler, and it took them about 45 minutes to go about the length of a city block. Because I passed them going one direction, and came back almost an hour later going the other direction, and they just barely made it down the street. And little girl had a bucket with her, and she’s picking things up, and dad is just leisurely checking out the world with her.

And more of those opportunities to not rush the moment, when kids are having experience, would be beneficial. Another thing that familiarity bias blinds us to, maybe, is we under-appreciate the questions kids are asking. Because again, we rush through them.

The why questions. Because look, when you’re young and new to the world, you’re curious about a lot of things, and so you’ve got a lot of questions. And often, because we’ve got things to do, and we’re not being here and now in the moment, we rush past those questions.

Another thing about familiarity bias I want to touch on is the idea of counteracting that bias within us, so we can make more, so we can see more with the eyes, the fresh eyes of a child. One thing we can do is we can pause and observe. Slow down.

Be, again, right here right now, in the moment, like we talked about in topic one. Slowing down, pausing, and observing. Slowing ourselves down.

Just not rushing. Being here, being in the present. Celebrate the repetitions.

One thing that comes from the newness of everything is kids like to repeat things a lot. You’ve probably noticed. And so when they want to read Brown Bear for the sixth time in a row, or when they need to mix the yellow and the blue Play-Doh again, allowing for those things.

A lot of times, we adults, we get busy, and we’re not in the moment, and we want to avoid those repetitions. I mean, often because they’re boring to us, right? And then we need to respect their curiosity. Just kind of enjoy it and go with it for a little bit.

We’re running out of time. I said we’re gonna have short episodes of the show, so let’s get to it. One, check out the Playvolution HQ early learning glossary there.

There’s hundreds of definitions of things like familiarity bias. Next, our Amazon link for this month. You can support the show by shopping my Amazon link, Swinging Pendulums.

It’s a wonderful book. A lot of the things I talk about in this show are gone into in more depth in that amazing, amazing book. We got a transition there, and now we got a transition back here.

Sorry, the slides aren’t moving quite right. And of course, share the show, if you like it, with somebody who you think might like it. I’d appreciate it.

Next week, we’re gonna look at defining loose parts and some other loose parts stuff, as we jump into things. And finally, Dad Joke of the Week. Can a kangaroo jump higher than the tallest building? No.

Buildings, buildings can’t jump. You like, you like that one, Jeeves? Hey, thanks for listening. Back soon with another episode.

Bye-bye.

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