Navigating a co-op with a newborn can be a big transition, which is why Skytown prioritizes supporting our "superhero" families with maternity/paternity leave, community meal trains, and even playdate trains!

One of our parents returned to the classroom this week with her newborn, and she had so much gratitude to share.

We teachers talk a lot about play-based learning being important for confidence-building. And when we do, we often put it in the context of social confidence: confidence in peer-to-peer interactions, invitations to play, expressing rules of games, and even declining to play—all the play skills we’ve been exploring.

But there’s also the confidence that comes from being in, and owning, a space.

We have been working hard on putting on capes. Just two weeks ago, I remember a participating parent prompting one of our students to lay the cape he wanted to wear flat on the floor, and think about how it would get from there to around his neck. The student was not super thrilled with this idea, but took it in stride. He was looking at it the same way he looked at the other costumes he had figured out how to put on by himself—the dinosaur costume or the giraffe costumes.

Co-regulation is generally the process where two people help each other manage emotions. In our Skytown space, we are talking about the dynamic between an adult and a child. 

We help children figure out how to regulate their own emotions in at least two ways: (a) by modeling how we handle our own emotions, and (b) through co-regulation.

Skytown is a play-based, emergent curriculum school, which means we are always watching for ways to help children expand their play. Play is, after all, how we believe children learn at this age. At Skytown, that’s what our children spend their time doing, and we believe that through play, children learn to problem-solve, act out sociodramatic scenes that make them feel powerful in their world, and explore the environment we offer them.