So You’re Living the ‘Sheltered’ Life Now

We are all spending much more time at home these days, and Play Frontier wants to find new ways of empowering families to incorporate play and nature into this sudden lifestyle change! We've got some projects brewing to help everyone at home with this new stay-at-home-all-the-time life. While all of us at Play Frontier are missing our school families, we are excited to share some of our knowledge with you in a new digital way over the next few weeks.

We call this new space on the website ‘The Homestead’, and to kick things off we’d like to help you find a new normal.

We've seen a lot of daily schedules floating around lately, and they seem to focus on the adult in the relationship instead of the child. With that, we made a "home play rhythm" schedule. The idea is that you do the same predictable order of things each day, allowing your children to feel comfort in the routine. At the same time, the things they DO during each block will change each day based on their mood, interests, and energy levels. As a bonus for Play Frontier preschoolers - this is more or less the same schedule we use at school, so they should already know the pacing of this rhythm! The preschool has one drawn out in our room, and we find kids checking in on the "map of the day" to see what happens next.

How To Use our Home PlAY rhYthm Schedule

Print this out (or write it out yourself if you don't have access to a printer right now) and hang it somewhere your kids can see it. The schedule is purposefully a weird shape so you and your family can draw simple illustrations along the sides that represent things unique to your child and your house and your family. They don’t have to be fancy! Stick figures are great! Even better, encourage your child to draw meaningful things to THEM. Bonus: include them in the project, tell them what letters you’re writing, and suddenly this is an awesome literacy activity AND builds trust and respect.

DID YOU NOTICE that there aren't any times?! This is very important. So important I’d shout it from the rooftops if you all could hear me… young children are task-based, NOT time-based like adults. What does this mean? It means they don’t give a hoot that it’s 12:00 and lunchtime, they NEED to finish their drawing first. Completion of tasks is critical to them, and the sooner you embrace that time is an adult construct the easier your transitions will be!

Hey wait, this does NOT apply to food and sleep. Well it does, a little, but not in the same way. Eating and sleeping at about the same time every day will help eliminate a whole new mess of struggles. It will help kids actually feel hungry and know if they get TOO hungry food is coming soon. It will help them mentally prepare for rest and start noticing how their own body feels when it’s tired. Really, the goal here is healthy happy kids who are in charge of their own bodies!

Coming soon: Home Play Rhythm in action, Independent play ideas for inside and out, killer playdough recipes, tasty treats, and much much more! Anything in particular you’d like to see or know more about? Leave a comment below or contact us at tiffany@playfrontier.org.

Do plAces hAve birthdAYs?

Well, we’ve made it. Our doors have been open for a whole month and each day brings new joys, new excitement, and new adventures. Celebrating our first month with kids got me thinking… do places have birthdays? When was Play Frontier born?

Was it born the first official licensed day open, April 2? Or how about our first day with employees, March 26? Or maybe the first board meeting? The first day with keys to the building? First day as a nonprofit, adopted by our sponsors, CEKC? The first day with a business license? First business cards? First day with a logo (shout-out to Eliza Carver for her incredible work!)?

Does it go back even further than that? Back to the day I resigned from my delightful and steady job to dive off the deep end? Back further to the first secret “Frontier” Pinterest board, full of images and dreams of what could be? Or maybe back even further, to spring 2016 when the name Frontier hit me like a ton of bricks and started coloring my world-view with ideas for “someday, at my own school…”

What about even further than that? Back to when the building we inhabit was built, or back to when the fields were cleared and ground was broken for the Wind River Nursery. Maybe that’s taking it a bit too far… but it’s important to me, because we love this place, this tree-processing-plant-turned-marijuana-grow-facility-turned-playschool, and we are thankful for all of it. We are thankful for the journey itself.

The reality is that celebrating place is not nearly as important as celebrating people. Celebrating the people who led us to this place, the people who encouraged us to keep going when the path was unclear. Celebrating the people who have volunteered countless hours and hard-earned money to help see this dream realized. Celebrating the people who took a chance on us when Frontier was new and unpredictable, for they all make us who we are today.

We would like to celebrate the people we proudly call our community partners - our Founders, and our Founding Families of Play Frontier - in the way we know best… by making something that will live forever in our hearts and hands.

With thAt, I would like to introduce our Origin Quilt.

Crafted by Tasha Johnson of Explorations Early Learning, this quilt was made as a means of honoring all of the Founders and Founding Families. The idea is that each person, family, and organization that helped us during our first year gets their name written on the quilt. It will hang in our hallway for all to see, and will get taken down at the end of the year to be used by the kids at nap time and during play. Each new child who spends time at Play Frontier will get to snuggle in it and let it keep them warm, build a fort with it, see the letters and names and ask questions about it. Our Origin Quilt will keep the memory of all of the love and work that went into our beginnings.

Know a person or organization that might be interested in adding their name to the quilt? Send a sponsorship form their way, or have them donate through the button at the bottom of this website! (All donations are tax-deductible… wahoo!)

“Why donate? Don’t your families pay tuition?”

This question has come up a few times, and the answer is that our goal at Play Frontier, a nonprofit organization, is to keep the cost of childcare affordable to our community by raising additional money to cover our operating costs. Tuition covers our day-to-day costs, but we need additional funds to make facility improvements - like building playground structures, to purchase larger items, and have on hand for emergencies (whoa that was a lot of snow to move). Your donation makes Play Frontier an even better, stronger, and happier place.