In PHQP 0007 Humans Are In Motion Learners, Jeff explores why movement is essential for learning, creativity, and emotional regulation. He discusses how modern children are more sedentary than ever and why early learning environments should prioritize child-led motion. Drawing from Brain Rules by John Medina, Jeff highlights how active engagement with the world wires the brain’s sensory systems and supports deeper learning. He also shares a simple trick for stopping kids from over-pumping soap and reflects on the excitement of a rare Gulf Coast snowfall. Jeff hopes the episode holds up despite forgetting to wear his glasses and a fumbled outro transition. Plus, don’t miss the Dad Joke of the Week!

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0007 Humans Are In Motion Learners

Episode Notes

• Avoid Making Loose Parts Less Loose
• The ‘Loose’ Refers To Open-ended Flexibility And Freedom
• Create A Loose Parts Mindset | 3 Tips
• The Theory Of Loose Parts
• Physical Domain
• Digging | The Playful Benefits
• Beware The Preschool Chair
• The 5 Best Reasons To Ditch Flashcards
• Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School

The Humans Are In Motion Learners Transcript

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So, first up, my dog Gigi was very happy the other day. We got some snow here at the beach where we live on the Gulf Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of America, I don’t care what you call it. It doesn’t happen here very often.

She was very excited. She likes going to the beach, but we ended up with about seven, eight inches of snow, and she was a very happy dog. Back when we lived in Iowa, she would go out when it was below freezing and make herself a little snow nest and lay there for hours.

So, she was glad to have a snow experience, which brings us to topic one, bright, shiny objects. For a lot of people here along the coast, it was a bright, shiny object moment because a lot of them didn’t have any experience with snow. Snow is really rare here.

We had seven inches a couple weeks ago. Last snow before that that was 93 and 63 and five snow events in 130 years, if I did the math halfway close to right. It’s not much snow.

So, we had interactions with lots of humans, very young humans and older humans, who had no memory, no experience with snow. So, it became a very interesting variable in their environment, which if you recall a couple episodes ago, we talked about loose parts as being variables in the environment with which people could interact. There was a lot of interacting going on, a lot of kids and adults building their first snowmen and tasting snow for the first time.

I was talking the day before the snow hit. I was talking to a little eight-year-old girl, and she was very excited to taste snow, but not the yellow kind. She made sure I was very clear on that because she’s heard you’re not supposed to taste the yellow snow.

And so, these variables in our environment are really important and something we should look for, whether we’re planning them ourselves or whether they just kind of plop themselves into our environment, because it’s a chance for a new experience. If you’ve never met snow, you may have theories about what snow is like, but you don’t have any actual hands-on experience. I saw kids out, not a lot of winter clothes here on the coast either.

It gets a little bit chilly, but not cold. And so, kids out with multiple sweatshirts on and like every pair of sweatpants they had on and socks on their hands for gloves and having a good time with it. It’s that experience is where the learning happens for kids and adults.

One of the takeaways for us with this kind of thing is to remember how new the world was to us when we were young children, because I think a lot of times we gloss over that. We forget the fact that little kids, even three, four, five, six, seven, eight-year-olds are still very, very new to the world and they haven’t had a lot of experiences or repeated a lot of experiences. And so, very much, they find new things almost every day in their lives.

A three-year-old who gets handed something as mundane as a stapler for the first time is going to be pretty amped up and excited to experiment with that new thing. And so, one of the ways we can support loose parts play and those random things that happen to be new experiences in our lives is to pause for a moment and remember how new and fresh they probably are for those children and slow down to take time to explore them. Luckily, the world ground to a halt down here for what up north would have been a very mild snow event.

We need to also embrace children’s interest in that newness. And that doesn’t really take much. Again, it’s that time and really that mental space to explore and interact, I think, is the best thing we can do to promote it.

There were some kids here in the neighborhood that weren’t out exploring the snow because it was apparently too novel and their adults were worried about safety, even with something much of the world deals with on a regular basis. So, embrace the interest, spend time with the new thing. Topic two.

Back in our core value series, this is part seven. Humans are in motion learners. We are built to move.

And we got a big problem because human children have never, never been more sedentary than they are right now in 2025. Children in 2024 probably moved more than children in 2025 are. Don’t hold me to that, but you get the idea.

In our modern world, kids are much more sedentary than they used to be. And kids in the 90s were more sedentary than my generation grew up in the 70s and 80s. And all we did is sit around and watch reruns of F Troop and Gilligan’s Island compared to kids in the 50s and 60s.

So, it’s been a multi-generational thing, this reduction in motion in early learning settings. And look, in some early learning programs, children literally get in trouble for moving too much. Because moving, something their body is telling them to do, is seen as a behavior problem.

And look, that’s messed up. Dr. John Medina wrote a book a number of years ago called Brain Rules. And brain rule number one has to do with the fact that we are in motion learners.

There’s a big connection to the mental process going on in our heads and the movement of our bodies. One important thing is that all of that motion wires the eight sensory systems. And without those sensory systems being well-wired and integrated with each other and the brain, we can’t learn anything.

Because the only way our brain gets information is through that active engagement with the world, with that engagement with the senses. So, we need to get kids moving more. Sedentary learners disengage.

And so, when we’re asking kids to sit still for long periods of time, and not only do we sit still, we sit still and we keep our feet still and we don’t fidget, we keep our hands to ourselves, that takes a lot of mental energy. And kids often have a very hard time paying attention to what you’re talking to them about because they’re focusing so hard on keeping their bodies still to keep from getting in trouble. And we kind of tend to space off when we’re sedentary.

Our mind isn’t as engaged as it is when we are allowed to be up and active and in motion. Moving bodies feed thinking brains. If you’re looking for a bumper sticker line, that’s probably a pretty good one.

Moving bodies feed thinking minds. And it’s very true. And this is why child-led play and exploration is so important because their children are naturally inclined to move, and so they do so in their play.

Now, there’s a wide variety of what is enough motion for any given child. Some children need to move a little bit and then they’re happy being sedentary. Some kids need to be in motion all of the time, it seems like.

And we need to create environments that support everybody along that spectrum. What do we got here next? Motion supports emotional regulation. One thing that I found in my early learning direct care experience, and I’ve heard over and over and over again for the 30 years just about that I’ve been in the field, I was making myself a little bit older than I am, it’s been going on 30 years I’ve been working in this field, is that when we create opportunities for kids to move more, behavior problems decrease.

Because we’ve created an environment where the kids are allowed to do what their body is signaling them that they need to do. And so all of that motion in the early years is preparing them to be able to sit still and focus on things a little bit more when they get a little bit older. But even we adults are probably more sedentary than we should be.

Because again, our brains thrive on that motion. So if you’re having behavior problems with that kid, one of the things you can do is think about how can I help this child move more. And then you can do away with a lot of the aggravation and the timeouts and head-butting that goes on with that child.

Movement also sparks creativity. If you’re having problems yourself solving a problem or coming up with a creative idea, one of the best things you can do is get up and get moving. And it’s the same for children.

If we want them to be creative, to connect ideas and information in unique ways, movement is a great way to spark that. And so movement wires the sensory system, it reduces behavior problems, it sparks creativity. There’s a lot to be said for it.

So the big question is, the takeaway here is, how can you fit more child-led motion into your day? How can you support giving kids the opportunity to be up and active and moving more frequently during the course of their early learning day? And look, if I say child-led, if the only way you can be comfortable with more movement is to be the director of it, do that. Because that’s better than leaving the kids sedentary. But what they really need is the opportunity for self-directed movement.

Because if you’ve got a group of eight or ten kids, not all of them are going to be interested in moving in the prescribed way that your active learning lesson might have in mind for them.

On any given day, some kid might need to be running, and somebody wants to be spinning in circles, and somebody else wants to be swinging back and forth on the swing set, and somebody else needs to be hopping, and somebody else feels like they need to be hanging upside down on the monkey bars. And that’s why giving them the choice is really important there, because it allows them to engage in the kind of physical motion, the activity that their bodies are yearning for.

So there’s a little bit of value in entrusting them to choose their own form of locomotion. Topic three, the soap dispenser trick. I was messaging with a family child care provider the other day, and she was dealing with some burnout.

And rightfully so, family child care can be a very, or all child care can be burnout inducing. But I think family child care, you might find yourself more isolated, and it might be a bigger challenge there, just because you don’t have a cohort of co-workers to rely on and vent to. So she sends me this email, and it’s got this laundry list of things that are frustrating her.

Things like, you know, that kid that she has a personality conflict with, and she let a family get behind on their bill, and she’s struggling to get that caught up with, and she feels like she never has any time for herself, and other things.

But one of the things on her list was the fact that it just annoys the heck out of her when kids take that soap dispenser in the bathroom, and they pump it, and they end up with a glob of soap on their hand that’s three times bigger than their palm, and there’s soap dripping down their hand, and it gets all over the counter. And so they’re wasting soap, they’re making a mess, she’s replacing the soap all the time, and I realized she didn’t know the soap dispenser trick.

And so if you get kids that are, because look, the inclination with a pump bottle is to push the pump all the way down, and so what you can do is you can take, for those of you who don’t know the soap dispenser trick, take a rubber band and loop it around the pump on your pump bottle, and it doesn’t just have, for soap or for lotion bottles, any kind of dispensers, and that limits the amount of travel on that pump.

And so you can adjust the size of your rubber band and the spacing there, and you can give them a little dose of soap instead of a big handful that is more than they need, and then you save soap, you save aggravation, and you save mess. And that makes life just a little bit easier.

I thought everybody knew the soap dispenser trick, and so I hadn’t even, I haven’t even brought this up before, but I think I’ll probably do a video on it as well. So I was able to share that idea with her. I can’t do anything about any of the other problems, but we were able to solve that one.

So give the soap dispenser trick a try if you are having frustrations with your soap or lotion bottle. All it takes is a rubber band. Wrapping the show up today, the takeaway is get moving.

Not only yourself, but the children in your program. Move more. It’s good for your brain, it’s good for your emotional state, it’s good for your creativity.

Nothing wrong with getting out and moving more. Gigi on the beach, she’s a very smart and creative dog because she spent so much time getting her exercise on the beach. Amazon idea of the week, if you’re a new listener, you can check out the show, the show notes.

There’s a link to my Amazon portal. You shop those links and it just sends a little bit to me since you use that link and supports the show, supports the Playvolution HQ website. Somebody purchased some of these sun hats, and look, they come in a bunch of different colors, and they’re apparently very well reviewed and really durable.

And if you’re looking to get moving on super sunny days, hats like this for all the kids are kind of a way to keep the little scalps and necks and faces from getting sunburnt. My trips to Alaska, just about all of the kids are wearing these kind of hats outside all of the time, and it makes sense. If you want kids to be up and moving, especially outside, you need to dress them for the environment.

So we got that going for us. I just had a camera problem, so I got to correct that before we move back to the other shot. There I am.

Next up, share it if you like it. The only way this podcast and the Playvolution HQ website get any support is from people who find things helpful sharing them. So I appreciate those people doing that.

Somebody reached out to me the other day. She knows that I’m not on the social media. She was wondering if she could set up, I think, a Twitter X account and share links to this site because I’m not doing it, and she wanted to know if she could do that.

And I’m not quite sure yet, but I might let that happen. I guess I wouldn’t have any control over it if she decided to do it on her own, but she reached out. Anyway, share things if you like them.

It’s much appreciated. Next week, we’re going to get into the idea that play is in the child and not in the toy. So tune in for that.

Dad joke of the week, as we wrap up, what do you call a broken can opener? You call a broken can opener a can’t opener. This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Can’t opener.

Thanks for listening. Back soon. Bye-bye.

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