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,
