HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Guess what?! ITS OUR BIRTHDAY TODAY. No joke, today marks one year of Play Frontier being open. WOW what a year it has been.

PARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY

CELEBRATE TONIGHT with a Play Frontier Dance Party using this sweet playlist, featuring hits from the preschool classroom:

First of all, I can't believe that our little school has come so far in so little time - largely because of the incredible support of friends and family like you - which has truly made this dream come true! Can you believe it's almost the one year anniversary of Play Frontier?! It’s been an exciting year full of exploring the outdoors, painting, making messes, and having fun in our play-based learning environment.

At the same time, we have had to temporarily close our doors due to COVID-19 in order to protect our children, families, and staff. (Happy birthday to us, right?)

In order to remove stress from our families, we have put all of our tuition on hold until further notice. The state of Washington, who usually covers our subsidy tuition and food program, is so far NOT covering costs during closures... which means we are in need of your help more than ever.

If you’re able, please consider donating to help us stay afloat during the trying times ahead, or even consider a monthly donation!

WE HAVE HAD AN AMAZING YEAR THOUGH. Don’t let the pandemic cloud this beautiful day!

Here are some highlights:

• Enrolled in Washington's Early Achievers program as soon as possible to accept families requiring state subsidy payment.

• Successfully graduated our first cohort of infants, meaning our infant teacher (Megan) moved up with them to the toddler room!  We are the only school in the SW Washington licensing district attempting this method, and so far it has been awesome!  Yay for infant-caregiver bonding!

• Rallied a fall work team to work on the beginning stages of our 'adventure playground.'

• Featured in the Pacific Crest Trail Association magazine for hiking with toddlers and preschoolers on the Pacific Crest Trail.

• Enrolled in the CACFP food program - we now make all meals on site, free of charge, for all kids enrolled.  We use organic and whole foods whenever possible.  My teachers and I are surprised at how lovely it is to cook meals with the children each day!  Toddlers in particular that have been with us since the beginning love almost any vegetable, bean, or rice dish we put in front of them.  I'm amazed at how diverse and healthy all of our diets are, and miss it greatly during this time apart!

• We are one of the only childcares in the nation that hikes with infants and toddlers, not just the forest school preschool kids.  This means we have toddlers who, while in daycare, learn the difference between a dark-eyed junco and a chickadee, learn how to forage for fresh salal berries, learn how to walk by wobbling along trails at Whistlepunk, and learn how to read by stopping at every sign in the Wind River Arboretum and asking about the trees.  Someone asked me how I'll know that my wild school dream has come true, and all of this is proof that it has!!

• I am also really really really proud of our teachers.  They are all well-spoken child advocates in our community, supporting every child they come across with love, acceptance, empowerment, and education!

• …and many many more amazing things! And we know there are more yet to come!

With that, happy birthday to us.

Enjoy your day, and above all, enjoy your children,

-TiffAnY

The Homestead: Playful Playdough

PlAYdough! PlAYdough! PlAYdough!

Playdough is one of our FAVORITE things to do, both at school and at home! We have a fail-safe, no-cook recipe that is just magic. Here’s the thing. Playdough recipes are basically all the same. Just like pie crust, its getting a feel for it and doing it over and over that realllllly dials in your playdough making skills. I’ve also written this recipe in a SUPER kid-friendly way, with the goal being that your child can help you with the making of it too!

Step 1: Assemble your tools

You will need:

• 1/2 cup measuring scoop. Specifically a 1/2 cup scoop, because if you want to minimize dishes and maximize helping, this is how you do that with only ONE dirty scoop and it adds EVEN MORE MATH to this conversation already. I’m calling this ‘one scoop.’

• 1 Tablespoon scoop. Again, specifically this size. I’m calling this ‘one spoonful.’

• 1 large bowl

• 1 large non-wooden spoon (or else all of the dough just sticks to the spoon like glue… like seized cheese even worse…)

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Step 2: Assemble your ingredients

Don’t let me confuse you here with this list of ingredients. Just make sure you have enough of each one but DON’T MEASURE IT YET. Do that part in step 3. For now, just make sure you have at least:

• 2.5 cups flour

• 1/2 cup salt

• 2T cream of tartar

• 2T cooking oil

• 1.5 cups boiling hot liquid (water or tea!)

• Any desired dry spices

• Any desired liquid oils/scents/colors

• 1 cute lil kid

Step 3: Make it with your child

1. In a large bowl, scoop out 4 scoops flour and 1 scoop salt, 2 spoonfuls cream of tartar, and 2 spoonfuls vegetable oil. Add any dry spices now, and stir until its all evenly mixed.

2. In a separate, heat-proof container, heat up 1.5 cups of water to boiling. Once it’s done, add any colors and liquid scents to the liquid here. In order for the playdough to actually work, the water needs to be hot enough and plentiful enough to fully dissolve the salt. Add in 3 scoops of this to the dry ingredients (1.5 cups)

3. HERE’S THE SECRET STEP! Add the full 1.5 cups of liquid, and it will still be super-duper sticky and wild. (This is pure delight for a young child, don’t stress about the mess!) Stir and knead it with your very sticky hands until it cools a little, then slowly SLOWLY add one or two handfuls at a time of flour into the mix. The key here is to get the salt all melted and evenly distributed and re-cooled and THEN get it the right texture. It will harden up a lot as it cools, don’t make it over-dry or crumbly by rushing this step.

Pro Tip: Don’t use anything with a sugar base for this, or it will get sticky and you’re in ant/mold city, baby!

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Step 4: playplayplay

Some pro-tips: Give your kid all of it at once! We are so used to the teeensy tiny amounts given in those delightful yellow tube-cans of ‘Pladoh’ that the idea of a whole mountain of it seems strange at first. BUT IT’S NOT IT’S JUST GLORIOUS. We put out a big plastic cutting board underneath it at home (mainly because The Kid loves using knives with his playdough most of all). Always mush it into one giant ball, then roll out into a log for storage (gotta reduce the surface area to reduce drying time), then roll all the air out of the bag and seal. To keep it extra super fresh put it in the fridge in between uses.

Playdough is pretty fun just as is, but we like to add a few kitchen tools to the mix too. I have fond memories of rifling through my grandmothers “mystery kitchen tools’ drawer, finding tools that haven’t seen the light of day since their purchase in 1972 and figuring out how they work while simultaneously cramming them full of playdough. Hard-boiled egg slicers, cherry pitters, jello molds…

…Maybe that’s why I love to cook so much today.

Want to download both the Playful Playdough Recipe and Play Starts ideas?

Final Thoughts: Playdough Rules

I could just leave you with some fun play ideas to ‘occupy your children’ while you attempt to work from home during this quarantine, but I promise that is NOT the goal here. Playdough is fully LOADED with learning - there’s a reason it’s a staple in preschool classrooms across the world! Here’s a quick developmental breakdown, using the “Developmentally Appropriate Practice” framework for you nerds like me:

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This list is just the tip of the iceberg…. so are you a playdough convert yet?! IT REALLY IS THE BEST. Slap together a batch for your kids asap, and watch the magic unfold.

Enjoy your day, and more importantly, enjoy your kids!

-TiffAnY

PS - Need more inspiration? Want to share your ideas and pics of your fam enjoying the recipe? Follow us on Instagram @playfrontier, and tag your photos #playfrontierplaydough to get featured on the site!

Announcing the Play Frontier Homestead

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.

Full Home Play Rhythm Here

Blank Home Play Rhythm Here

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.

Enjoy your day, and more importantly, enjoy your kids!

-TiffAnY