I am so excited for you to check out this episode of the podcast because I’m speaking with the great Deb Curtis.
Rusty Keeler: Yay. I’ve known Deb for a million years and she is so wise and inspiring and I don’t know the best vibe in early childhood education, in my opinion. And so we have a great conversation here, but we dove into it so quickly that I didn’t even get to read her bio. So I’m gonna read it now before we even start the conversation.
Rusty Keeler: And it’s. Kind of funny because it’s written in the first person, so it’s me saying, I’m Deb Curtis. Greetings. My name is Deb Curtis. I’m a passionate advocate for children and childhood, and the adults who care and educate them. I’ve spent my career championing the rights and brilliance of young children with decades of experience working alongside children and educators in early childhood programs across North America.
Rusty Keeler: I’ve spent countless hours observing. Learning from and studying children’s and teachers’ development as the author of several books focused on stories of children. I’ve shared insights drawn from real classrooms and relationships. I consider myself an avid kid watcher, someone who finds endless inspiration in children’s capacity for connection, curiosity, and learning.
Rusty Keeler: This deep respect is what keeps me in the classroom. Engaged as a mentor teacher. Even beyond my the age, many choose to retire, I continue to observe, reflect with others, and share stories that remind us of the hope and possibility children bring to a complex world. You can find my work at Redleaf Press and Exchange Press or on the Facebook group, children’s Lively Minds.
Rusty Keeler: Yes. I told you she’s inspirational and hey, here’s a bonus. We are gonna do a book giveaway of one of Deb’s great books. All you need to do is listen to the podcast and. We have a special video that we put together of, uh, Deb and I looking at all these pictures of toddlers in her environment, in at her center, and we talk all about it.
Rusty Keeler: She describes what’s going on. We have a great conversation in the video too, that’s in the show notes link to YouTube. So listen to the podcast, watch the video, and you’ll get a clue. It’s sort of like a little treasure hunt. And then you can just, uh, email me at Play Nature Podcast at gmail with the answer.
Rusty Keeler: But without further ado, here’s our conversation.
Deb Curtis: Hi.
Rusty Keeler: Hello.
Deb Curtis: How are you?
Rusty Keeler: Hey, good. How are you?
Deb Curtis: Oh, hanging in. You asked me to talk about what I’ve been thinking about lately and children actually give me hope for humans because they’re, you know, my whole career, which is a long time now, since 1969, I was in the very first Head Start program in my community in Long Beach, California.
Deb Curtis: That was when Head Start was just the summer before kindergarten, summer program for kids from low income households. Anyway, so I, I have incredible hope for us. Yeah. Yeah. This whole entire career, what I’ve noticed about children is they’re really. Kind and they’re pretty much into helping and they wanna make a contribution to the group and they have these incredible social skills already.
Deb Curtis: And so I’ve been doing a lot of reading about it and research and all of the research confirms that we are born to be good. In fact, there’s a book called that. Uh, we’re born with a compassionate instinct, also a book about that. And I’ve been reading this book called Humankind, and really Darwin’s idea about the survival of the fittest is not accurate.
Deb Curtis: It’s survival of the kindest. This guy in this book, he’s a research way back to when we were, you know, in the cave people days and like all of these questions that he had about, well, how did we survive? Why didn’t they Neanderthals survive? Because they actually had better brains than we have in terms of being smart.
Deb Curtis: But they were, you know, sort of not kind. And so we’re, we, were the kindest. We survived because of that. And even our facial features have changed. They call us homo puppies because we’ve changed to have these incredible round faces and eyes and we’re, we’re more friendly looking than oh, than the Neanderthals were.
Deb Curtis: Anyway, I just, wow. You know, that’s my thing. I love to watch what kids do, and then I love to look at what does the science say about it? What do other people think about this? And. Bring that together. So that’s what I’ve been really excited about and collecting. I’ve been collecting those stories my whole career, but I’m putting it together and sort of, oh my goodness.
Deb Curtis: Uh, and I’m writing another book with Nadia about it. It’s called, uh, gonna be called Eagerness for Relationships. So it will, these stories about children doing amazing things. Then the, the research and the science that supports this, and one of the things that it says is that when we try to teach children social skills, we actually undermine their natural abilities because we know they’re, they know we’re smarter than them and we’re powerful.
Deb Curtis: So they stop paying attention to their own natural instincts.
Deb Curtis: Oh.
Deb Curtis: And try to do what we say. So, yeah.
Deb Curtis: Yeah. It’s confusing. That’s very confusing. When you, you have, you already have a voice. They have the voice inside and inner guidance and
Deb Curtis: Yeah. Yeah. And then people, you gotta do it this way.
Rusty Keeler: Love it. It’s amazing.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Deb Curtis: But I feel like this needs to be out there in our profession. ’cause there’s everything about social skills curriculum and teach kids to share and teach compassion. And you don’t need to teach it. You need to recognize it and make it visible so it can grow. And I think that message needs to be out there, so.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. So how, how do you see that? What, what are some examples that just is a, like, obvious, like the natural compassion that we, we, we come into the world with and, and
Deb Curtis: well, I mean, you see it in relationship to how children respond to each other’s sadness and. Struggle, particularly to young toddlers.
Deb Curtis: They will go and try to comfort somebody. They wanna help when you, when you give them the opportunity to wash the tables, they wanna move right in there. They recognize when something’s not fair. Like I use that a lot. ’cause I read this idea that children have a. Understanding of fairness from the time they’re really young, like 10 months or something.
Deb Curtis: Anyway, so Co Koji has all the trucks and Caico wants some and. So I just named that. Oh look, Koji, you have all the trucks and Caico doesn’t have any, that doesn’t seem very fair. That’s all I have to say. And he’ll start, he is like, oh, okay. Starts giving. And that happens more often than not. I would say probably 80% of the time kids will go, oh yeah, it needs to be fair.
Deb Curtis: So I think those kinds of things are really powerful. I, I’ve been doing some, uh, mentor teacher teaching in a preschool this last year. And. They were, there were these girls having this conversation about, uh, I got here first. I had it first, which is something we do with kids. Like, if you had it first, you get it.
Deb Curtis: And I was always like, so what if you had it first? Like, what does that mean Anyway, so they were having this like little dispute and I don’t, I try not to move in until. I give them opportunity, so they all wanted to sit on a bench and they couldn’t all fit. So they were having this discussion. Well, I was here first.
Deb Curtis: Well, I’ve been here 30,000 minutes. Well, I’ve been, you know, they were like having this huge discussion about it. So finally one of the children said, well, I know, why don’t we walk over here and sit on this bench? ’cause then we could all sit together. So it was her idea. Mm-hmm. So that was because I didn’t jump in.
Deb Curtis: Right. Most grownups don’t give that time. Move in and try to solve it or try to do some sort of problem solving rather than see what happens.
Speaker 6: Mm-hmm. And
Deb Curtis: you know, if they hadn’t gone for it after a while, I would, as you know, offered the idea, well that doesn’t seem fair, that she doesn’t get to sit there with you.
Deb Curtis: And she had a great idea. That might have been what I’d said if nothing would’ve shifted. And it doesn’t always, but most of the time it does. And I wanna call on that in children. Help that happen. Help them see their own kindness and compassion and, and wanting to be together to do it together.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Nurture that
Deb Curtis: make it visible to me and to them so that it can grow. ’cause the stories we tell is what grows. Mm-hmm. And if we the story of that’s what’s gonna grow. Instead of, oh look, we’re all playing together. Oh, we all have the same ideas.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah, we’re in it together. We’re in it together.
Rusty Keeler: It’s not a competition.
Deb Curtis: Yeah. And that’s our natural way, right? That is the natural way for humans to be, is to be together. And children want that. More than anybody ’cause they haven’t had it trained out of them. So, you know, I started getting more specific about it with the schema theory. Do you know that book?
Deb Curtis: My book?
Rusty Keeler: Oh,
Deb Curtis: children’s Lively Minds. And it’s got this idea of, uh, repeated, it’s a theory called Schema Theory and it’s pretty much promoted mostly in Great Britain and Australia. That’s where I learned it. I went to New Zealand or Australia and learned about it. So basically what it is, is these repeated actions and patterns in children’s play that are reflections of their brain development.
Deb Curtis: And they do it over things, over and over again. And it’s things like dumping and filling, you know, it’s mostly things that annoy you. It’s things like transporting things from place to place without necessarily a purpose. Just moving things trajectory. You probably know this one ’cause you create all kinds of opportunities for that in your design.
Deb Curtis: Make things move. Make your body move, fly through the air, run down a ramp. Throw a ball, zoom, so that’s another one. Another one is enclosure, getting inside things or putting things inside other things. Anyway, so that was this big thing that I was paying attention to and Nadia and I, the co-author of that book.
Deb Curtis: We were talking, we were sending each other text messages and pictures. Look, this is happening. And there were no books in the United States about it. And all the ones from New Zealand and the other places are all white ki all white kids. So we wanted to reflect the beautiful diversity of our program. So we wrote this book and it’s such a powerful notion once you see it.
Deb Curtis: You never stop seeing it because it’s what happens. So to build on this idea of relationships, all children see these things and they see them in each other, and it is how they play together without words, oh, you wanna zoom down that hill? I wanna do that too. Oh, you wanna dump that? So do I. Oh, you wanna change that somehow?
Deb Curtis: So that’s how they play together with this. Repeated actions that they’re all doing, it’s familiar to them and they don’t even need words to do it. So it’s pretty amazing when you start seeing all this stuff.
Deb Curtis: Wow. Yeah.
Deb Curtis: How it works to build their brain and their relationships with each other. So yeah, and I could probably name ways your designs, your environmental designs involve all of these things.
Deb Curtis: Even if you haven’t thought specifically about mm-hmm.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. The patterns. The patterns of play that children Yeah. Find themselves in and seek out. I love that idea of recognizing developmentally. It’s just an interesting perspective of like, oh, I recognize that person pouring water because I’m developmentally in that, that zone too, and I wanna do that and side by side and Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: And let’s
Deb Curtis: do it together. Let’s do it together. Yeah. It’s powerful, powerful stuff. Once you start seeing,
Rusty Keeler: so then these, these are patterns that are helping to make the branches of the brain building the different. Pieces and parts.
Deb Curtis: Yeah, it’s all about brain development. I mean, it’s not, you can’t check it off on a box, right?
Deb Curtis: Oh, there’s that brain pathway for this. It’s this, you know, sort of continual way that the brain makes connections. And obviously you know this too, that physicality is hugely important for brain development. So just a more specific thinking about. What that means. Like they’ve also connected these schemas to math play, like all of it is math and physics.
Deb Curtis: Right? The way that, and one of them is also sorting and classifying, lining things up. Those are, there’s, they’ve identified about 40 schemas in children’s play. Naty and I only write about eight of them. So there are a lot of people who are, have nerd brains like go horizontal this and vertical this. So it’s, it’s fascinating to me.
Deb Curtis: I like that stuff.
Rusty Keeler: Well, what are the eight?
Deb Curtis: Oh, okay, so it’s enclosing and enveloping.
Rusty Keeler: Okay.
Deb Curtis: So you do that with your own body, right? You get inside things, you cover yourself, or that’s enveloping or in getting in a hole or a cubby, or you know, some of those things that you design on playgrounds.
Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.
Deb Curtis: It’s also. And closing is filling, but also dumping, like making things fall out so that they call trajectory, right? When things you make things move, whether it be your body speeding down or a ball or you know, these are these main things, right? Mm-hmm. That when kids do that, like I used to have this group of preschool boys who would.
Deb Curtis: Zoom the little cars all over the room and I was like, ah, you’re gonna break a window. You’re gonna poke your eye out. You know, it was like, really? ’cause they would, they would just zoom them. So my coworker and I, this is before I knew about schemas, uh, we decided, well let’s try this. ’cause they are having so much fun.
Deb Curtis: And we were just being the preschool police the whole day. Like stopping it and it obviously was not working. So we decided to try it ourselves and we had a blast trying to figure out how to make these cars zoom everywhere. So then we started provisioning for it in ways that would control the zoom.
Deb Curtis: Right. So we found ramps, we found things with openings that they can put it in. We, we got a great big. Tube that went from our climber in the room, our loft to the floor, so that they could do it in ways that was okay with us and wasn’t just flying. So that trajectory is a big one. And they do most of these schemas with their own bodies first, right?
Deb Curtis: And close their bodies, zoom their bodies down a ramp or down. Uh, you know, in those places then there’s also transforming, making things change. You know why a baby squishes a banana? And, you know, makes you know a mess.
Speaker 6: Mm-hmm.
Deb Curtis: I would say another annoying behavior. A mess. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 6: And
Deb Curtis: that’s also a huge one.
Deb Curtis: That’s why they love things like water play and Play-Doh and all of those things that appeal to this desire to make something change, to transform the world. Let’s see what else? Like I said, orientation and perspective. Like how can you see, how often have you seen kids put things up to their eyes, right?
Deb Curtis: To look through something. Uh, so they wanna change their perspective or, or go upside down so they see how the world looks. Yeah.
Deb Curtis: Yeah. By parents. So that’s
Deb Curtis: another one. Ordering and classifying, lining things up, matching things, stacking things. If there’s vertical and horizontal ordering and classifying, what am I forgetting?
Deb Curtis: Oh, this one’s a fascinating one. Rotation and circularity. Children are drawn to things that are circles that they can make turn in circles. So you see that all the time, right? That they wanna do things that make them spin or, uh, and I, I was like, well, why is that? Why do, why are we drawn to circular things?
Deb Curtis: So I looked that up. And basically they discovered when they did brain imaging, when we’re looking at something circular or curved shaped the part of our brain that feels calm, lights up. And when we’re looking at an angles and points and things like that, the part of our brain that feels stressed, lights up.
Deb Curtis: Uh, and then
Deb Curtis: they looked at human faces, right? And that’s this whole homo puppy again. Uh. All these curved lines and circles on our face. So, uh, that has to do with babies look zoom, you know, looking in their face
Speaker 6: mm-hmm.
Deb Curtis: Members’ eyes and seeing this round face and round eyes and feeling really calm. So it’s like all of these connections, it’s just like astonishing from my point of view.
Deb Curtis: Um, there’s so many, there’s so much complexity in the world, and. I love to think about those things. I have a curious mind. I hang out with toddlers. They make me that way.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, they are like, they’re investigating, I would say, like a planet in outer space. They’re searching, they’re, they’re curious.
Rusty Keeler: They’re wondering, they’re figuring it out. I mean, really, you suddenly, you find yourself as a toddler and there’s, here’s the world and what’s it do?
Deb Curtis: Yeah. It’s just so exciting. Right. There’s, and you have extra sensory perception and most people call that, uh, attention deficit. You know, you have an, you have an excitement for everything.
Deb Curtis: Attention for everything. Your brain is built that way. Yeah. ‘
Speaker 6: cause
Deb Curtis: that’s how you learn, right? Something new comes, you wanna see it.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Deb Curtis: People say that’s a deficit, attention deficit, rather than, I call it attention for everything or super attention because they, that’s what their brain is seeking, right?
Deb Curtis: Their, their brains are really open, way more open than ours. Ours are kind of. Stuck in place unless we do things to try to keep them open. Mm-hmm. Uh, so that’s what they’re doing. Like you say, oh, here, look the world. Now I can move. Now I can do this. Now I can change this. And then there’s this natural gift of your brain telling you what to do to figure it out.
Deb Curtis: These schemas, it’s like astonishing.
Deb Curtis: Hmm. Yeah.
Deb Curtis: And did you know the scientific method was defined by watching children play? It was No,
Rusty Keeler: it,
Deb Curtis: yes.
Rusty Keeler: Did not know that. What do you what? What do you mean
Deb Curtis: look that up? Because they were trying to figure out like what goes on, and they saw how children like had hypotheses.
Deb Curtis: They tried out their theories. They used problem solving and trial and error. Statistics. I mean, as young as 10 month old, they’re doing statistical analysis of the world. Like, you do this, I do this, you do this, I do this. Noticing what you might do. You know, I don’t think we see how amazing children are and I wanna make sure that we don’t interfere with that.
Deb Curtis: That we don’t undermine these natural gifts and abilities. ’cause that’s, it’s amazing who humans
Rusty Keeler: are in the world. When you work with adults, what are some of your favorite ways from this perspective of offering and helping, you know, make change come from you to, to the people you’re with, to the children they’re with?
Rusty Keeler: What are,
Deb Curtis: yeah, that’s this side by side work I described. When we go and the focus is looking at what do we notice, and I try to help people see themselves first, because I really believe that as. Educators in a room with a group of children, we have all the power. Sometimes don’t feel like it. We decide when the lights are on or off.
Deb Curtis: We decide what materials are gonna be available when kids get to go outside. We decide everything. We decide who we’re gonna pay attention to and why, and who we’re not gonna pay attention to, and what are we gonna further and notice. So all those things have so much power in a group of children, and I want us to do it with intention and.
Deb Curtis: To really make sure we’re not undermining these amazing people. So that’s what I, you know, we go in first in these observations, and I suggest don’t, don’t do anything but notice yourself. What are you noticing? Why are you noticing that? What’s your response to it? And then notice what you wouldn’t have noticed.
Deb Curtis: So what are you noticing that you wouldn’t have noticed, and how do you respond to that and, and what happens when you don’t respond? If you’re not the one responding, you don’t have a role, what happens? And that’s a really powerful tool, I think, for adults to work with children because, and it’s not an easy one, right?
Deb Curtis: Because you have so many things you have to pay attention to, and the idea that you would stop and pay attention to yourself, it’s sort of what, but the truth is you’re only paying attention to yourself anyway, so you might as well be intentional about it.
Speaker 6: Hmm.
Deb Curtis: Through what it is, and I think it takes practice.
Deb Curtis: You need to do it away. You need to notice and reflect and notice and reflect so that when you’re in the moment, you have more of a repertoire to call on, to make meaning. ’cause there’s so many things happening and there’s not one right way, right? There are many ways and many meanings to make about what’s going on right now.
Deb Curtis: And you get to decide which one you’re gonna, you know, notice what you value here. What do you wanna help grow? And further, and again, not easy, I’m not some sort of pie in the sky person that thinks this is all magic wand. It’s not an easy job to do, but that’s the way to make it nourishing for yourself.
Deb Curtis: And also, if you’re looking for what you love, the children are gonna be a lot happier because you’re gonna be
Speaker 6: really
Deb Curtis: happy. Mm-hmm. You’re gonna be loving everything so. That’s what I think is the most useful. And I have to say, if I’m not in a role where people are, I’m supporting them to slow down and do this, you know, it’s a very specific structure for notice practice.
Deb Curtis: Right. But if I’m just side by side with people. Working with them, not very patient because I’m seeing these things children are doing as amazing and they’re not. Right,
Rusty Keeler: right, right. So I’ve
Deb Curtis: just been doing it so wow. Long. I wanna just go, wait, look.
Rusty Keeler: So okay. That, that noticing, you know, as an adult and you know, whether it’s educator or for parents too, you know, all the different things that parents are juggling.
Rusty Keeler: I don’t know what, what can people do in a small way that, that, uh, noticing themselves or watching themselves?
Deb Curtis: Well, I suggest you just even pause for 20 seconds.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm.
Deb Curtis: Just pause for a minute. Mm-hmm. And take it in. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 6: Nothing
Deb Curtis: is so urgent. Sometimes it might be you have to jump in, but not, things are not that urgent that you have to jump in.
Deb Curtis: So how do you even pause for 20 seconds? Take a breath and try to see what a child’s. What might be on a child’s mind or what they’re trying to accomplish. So I think that’s a really. Good idea. And then once you start seeing that you can pause for that long, maybe you can pause for a little longer and not interact for a while to see one unfolds.
Deb Curtis: Like you don’t have to fix everything. In fact, when you try to fix things, you undermine what’s going on. So that’s to me a first little practice. It’s just stop, breathe, and note. And then I suggest people, how do you see what children are doing as amazing? How do you not judge it as something that needs fixing or care?
Deb Curtis: How do you try to get curious about what is this child trying to accomplish? What’s on their mind? How is this something that’s going to help them from their point of view? Because I really believe so children seek what they benefit from that we’re born. With all of these natural abilities, instincts, approaches to life that benefit us and our brain.
Deb Curtis: Sometimes we’re not right about that as a child, and sometimes adults have a better way, but children don’t do things just to be mean. They don’t. Do things just to mess up the world. They do them because there’s something that they think they’re gonna benefit from, either naturally or because what their life has been.
Deb Curtis: So if you can shift. Your attention to that. I think that helps you see confidence. And if there’s a kid that drives you nuts, find the ways you can fall in love with them, because that’s the only way you’re gonna help yourself in them, right? If it’s always about, no, no, no, no, no. That’s just gonna keep perpetuating their negative feelings about themselves and life and the, and then you’re only gonna see that story of that child.
Deb Curtis: So how do you find all the ways the child is doing something amazing that you can love? So those are little, and it takes practice. It doesn’t get fixed right away, and you’re human and you have headaches, and I don’t think there’s any right answers to any of this. I do think there are wrong answers. The wrong answers are gonna hurt a child emotionally or physically that point.
Deb Curtis: And that, you know, we could have different opinions about what that would look like. But again, there are so many things that you can do and it’s just a matter of what do you wanna do and what do you wanna further, what do you value? Mm-hmm. How do you, this child’s competence and. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Not easy. I’m noting it’s easy.
Rusty Keeler: No, no, no. So layered and complex and changing all the time and,
Deb Curtis: mm-hmm.
Rusty Keeler: Wow. Uh, I like that, that there’s no, there’s no right answer, but there are wrong answers.
Deb Curtis: Yep.
Rusty Keeler: So how do we shift to the, yeah, to the, the realm of right answers. So what are, how about with the educators, when, when they, they try this on and they go through the process with you and they’re butting their lips and what do, what do they find from the exercise or what Yeah, what kind of noticing and people like, I am gonna change, I wanna change or.
Rusty Keeler: I don’t know. Yeah.
Deb Curtis: There is that process of, you know, like, wow, self discovery, and I did this in San Diego, and they wanna keep, they start, they kept doing it. She started giving these opportunities not to have a role. To just watch. So they keep doing it? Yeah. Yeah. Because they realize how much they can gain from being able to just watch and notice and talk to somebody else about what you just saw and get another point of view and things.
Deb Curtis: So again, she took it right up and started creating these structures for people to have time off the floor, but to be in the room. To really watch and see. So that happened. That just happened. I don’t know. I did this work over many years in the same program with the same people, and one of the things that made me believe it was valuable is that the same teachers kept signing up to do it.
Deb Curtis: I did it in Arizona, like for four or five years in toddler programs with toddler teachers. The same group of people signed up every year to be a part of this. Mm. I would go four times a year and we would do this work in the classroom. Uh, I did it in Texas for 10 years and in Canada for many years, and the same people just kept wanting to do it.
Deb Curtis: So. That’s another reason I think it’s real. People find it really useful. It’s not easy, it’s an expensive model, right? To have teachers in a room that don’t have a role but watching, but it makes such a difference
Speaker 6: in mm-hmm.
Deb Curtis: How they see their work and. Thing
Rusty Keeler: when I, when I first started and, uh, you know, getting these ideas for the nature play.
Rusty Keeler: And, and I, when my first three jobs was up at Cornell University and they had an amazing early childhood program. Incredible teachers and they had a, you know, the behind the two-way mirror glass stuff. So I remember going up there, it was like I, I had a project to do for the outdoor play, but I was just there to kinda learn about the early childhood world that, you know, way back when.
Rusty Keeler: And, and it was just interesting to even have that, of like, what, what those, the college students, the experience that they could have. What, what you see through that window when you are not. Involved at all. At all, right? Just to really watch what happens. And then you see the adults and it’s interesting there.
Rusty Keeler: Then you see the adults. You see what those adults in there don’t see. ’cause they’re not, you know, they’re not. Yeah. There’s so many, I mean, in incredible things. Incredible. And I do that now. I have a favorite preschool that my sons went to, and I’m friends with the director in town and just, I’ll go, like, embed myself, you know, take pictures or do, you know, scribble ideas and stuff and watch and, and again, the things that you see, like just magical, magical moments that just, yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Rise and fall. Rise and fall, and, and then it goes back into the swirl of, of the flow of play.
Deb Curtis: Yeah. Isn’t play amazing, it’s just still these, I get so excited about what I see, like I was, yesterday, I was at the program I go to, I go to this preschool. I’m, I was watching these children that were soul.
Deb Curtis: Remarkable. I, I focused on this one little girl who was like running around the yard kind of in her own drama, right? With this like claws out and her face fierce and she’s growling as she runs and, and then she stopped and there was this structure made out of holes and. That it was turn, it was like a square made out of poles.
Deb Curtis: And so she decided she was gonna pick it up and she just, it was really unwieldy and a little bit heavy, but she stuck with it. And again, her, she had the best facial expressions and so she picked it up and moved it and went back and forth across the yard, really like tippy and unwieldy, but did it. And then she went.
Deb Curtis: Put that down, and she went running to the climbing structure, jumped onto the top and flung herself way off, and then just had this look on her face and I, I just got so happy watching her right, like this, this power, this feeling of powerful and fierceness and strength. Then. Drama. It was just, I love watching it.
Deb Curtis: It just makes me so happy and you know, I know all the things about what was happening in that are helping her grow and learn and all of that stuff, you know, ’cause I’ve studied it so much, but just the pure feeling like. Of what she was experiencing. And you know, that’s another thing, mirror neurons. When you pay attention to someone, your brain does the same thing their brain does.
Deb Curtis: That’s like a huge way humans look.
Speaker 6: Oh,
Deb Curtis: you can feel that amazing feeling of wonder and magic and. Effervescence. Yes. By just watching them brain gets that way.
Rusty Keeler: Mm-hmm. So
Deb Curtis: try it. You do. It sounds like that’s what you
Rusty Keeler: do. I do, I do. Well, it made me think of this, this little sequence, this little story, watching this play.
Rusty Keeler: It was a sand pit area with a little trickle of water and there were two girls that were in, in the sand and they were, there were little troughs and they were, you know, putting different cup, pouring it in cups and then pouring it in their, uh, in the sand and doing things. And teachers were elsewhere. So they kept doing things and they both had sun hats on and at one point they got the idea of like, oh, what if we put the water instead of a cup into our sun hats and then carry it over in the sun hats?
Speaker 6: Enclosure. Yeah.
Rusty Keeler: Right. Enclosure. And then, and then how does a sun hat hold water compared to a, you know, a plastic cup? And they did that for a while, and then they were standing side by side, both filling their hats and there was, it was like another unspoken thing. They both said it. You could say, put it on our heads.
Rusty Keeler: And they put it on their, and I, I was just watching and they did, and they had the instantaneously the same experience of the water. Suddenly what that felt like and their eyes together. And it was like this, I just felt like this emotional supernova of like
Speaker 6: exactly
Rusty Keeler: joy, excitement, and, uh. I, they would. I was just a witness.
Rusty Keeler: Right. Teachers were also it. Yeah. I bet
Deb Curtis: your brain did it too. ’cause you were right there with them. I
Deb Curtis: felt it. Yes. I was
Deb Curtis: like, ah, yes. That is the best story. I love it.
Deb Curtis: Oh my gosh.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah.
Deb Curtis: I love it.
Rusty Keeler: Yeah. A million magic moments.
Deb Curtis: Yeah. If we just pause to notice. Just pause and marvel. That’s my other phrase.
Deb Curtis: Pause and marvel at what you’re seeing.
Deb Curtis: Mm-hmm. And yes,
Deb Curtis: it’s not easy. I gotta make sure people don’t just write me off. Yeah, yeah,
Deb Curtis: yeah, yeah. I get
Deb Curtis: that. It’s not an easy thing to do. I’ve been doing it for 60 years, so
Rusty Keeler: long time. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And educators, we know there’s a million, billion things going on in the classroom and, you know, all sorts of, of stuff happening and your goals and, you know, cleanups and, and, and high energy.
Rusty Keeler: But yeah, just, I mean, just the, the call, I mean, that’s for our life in general. Like deep breaths, deep breaths, where are we, what’s happening? And, and you know, in the greater things, how can we get through this or where are our. Allies and in it all, and yeah. Yeah.
Deb Curtis: Hold the complexity.
Rusty Keeler: Hold the complexity.
Rusty Keeler: Well, it’s been great to pause and marvel with you. Yeah. Today, Deb and
Deb Curtis: too. All
Rusty Keeler: right. All right, all
Deb Curtis: thanks
Rusty Keeler: rest. All right. Thanks Deb. See ya all. Bye.
Rusty Keeler: All right. Thanks for listening. Do you have a comment or a question? Email me at playnaturepodcast@gmail.com. You know, I like talking about this stuff and maybe we could use your question on a future podcast episode. As always, I have some free goodies for you in the show notes, including my outdoor loose parts guide, fun stuff in there.
Rusty Keeler: And so I wish you the best in your outdoor play adventures. And when it comes to adding nature to your yard or loose parts or saying yes to risky play, my favorite motto is dream big, start small and never stop. Oh yeah. Woo, woo, woo. Let’s do it. All right. Have fun out there.
