Teach Play Guide - Early Childhood Early Intervention

16/09/2025

24/07/2025

🧡 Exciting announcement! 🧡 for our Endeavour Hills Specialist School community.

Join ACD this August for A Good Life month. This series of webinars will help you to support and navigate your child's growing independence.

Each week, there will be a free online webinar. Our presenters are parents of children with disability, and they will cover four key topics: Supported Decision Making, Wills and Estate Planning, Microboards, Post-school: parents talk about what's next.

Click here to register for these exclusive webinars 👇 https://bit.ly/AGLaug2025

02/07/2025

Why Pretend Play Matters in Early Childhood

When children play doctor, vet, hairdresser or shopkeeper, they’re not just having fun — they’re building essential life skills.

Pretend play supports:
• Language development and communication
• Emotional regulation and expression
• Problem-solving and flexible thinking
• Social connection, understanding and empathy
• Creativity and imagination

These playful moments lay the groundwork for learning, relationships, and resilience. Play is serious work for little minds.

25/04/2025

12/03/2025

Go Sesame Street - AAC representation! 📱 🎤

23/06/2023

08/04/2023

💗

📷 DrBradJohnson

10/02/2023

I am very against using behaviour charte and I agree so very much with this!

Make Better Choices (with Missing The Mark)

It’s a common feature of the primary school classroom. The behaviour chart on the wall, with children’s names on pegs. Children are moved from the sun to the clouds, or from green to red if their behaviour isn’t what is required by their teacher. The language usually goes from celebratory ‘Star Student!’ to condemnatory ‘Poor Choices’ or ‘No Playtime’.

It's in public. The whole class can see who is doing well and who is struggling. The internet is full of versions of these charts to buy, and the advertising copy is all perky positivity. ‘Keep Your Students on Track!’ or ‘Help Your Class Make Good Choices!’. They look so cheerful in their bright colours, so harmless. Who could object? And they work! Children want to stay on the green zone because it feels so bad when they are moved.

Until you talk to the parent of a child who struggles. They’ll tell you about the way in which everyone in their class knows who is on the raincloud, and that no matter how hard their child tries, they just can’t keep still all day. They’ll tell you how their child is known as the ‘bad’ one, and the other children don’t want to play with them. They’ll tell you of developmentally inappropriate expectations, and of the way in which these charts put all the blame on the children.

They’ll tell you of the way in which the chart takes no account of the way that their child is dealing with friendship difficulties and family illness, and instead frame their actions as a ‘poor choice’. The behaviour charts stop us asking whether perhaps the way in which we require children to sit and listen at school isn’t a natural way for young humans to learn. They stop us seeing their behaviour as communication or feedback. It’s reduced to something to control.

These charts use public shaming to foster compliance. They use fear and anxiety – even the children who are always on the Sun lie awake at night, scared that one day they will fall from grace, and everyone will know. That’s how they work. Children ‘behave’ because they are scared of the consequences if they don’t.

It’s Children’s Mental Health week. Perhaps as a psychologist you might expect me to be using it to call for better funding for CAMHS, for a counsellor in every school. Perhaps you think I might be calling for more therapists to be trained and more wellbeing hubs. Instead, I’m calling for a mass take down of behaviour charts.

Psychologists will never have the same impact on mental health as changing the way we treat our children. We could have a psychologist on every street corner, but their job is to intervene when things have gone wrong. Far more efficient is to change the environment which is making children distressed. Think of it like lung cancer. We could have the best oncologists in the world, but all they can do is treat people who are already ill. To reduce levels of lung cancer, we needed a smoking ban.

We’re using shame and anxiety to control children’s behaviour, thinly disguised in bright colours and ‘Ready to Learn!’. It should be no surprise that many of them are unhappy and anxious. In fact, perhaps we should be more surprised if they weren’t. It’s in the very air that they breathe and we, the adults, are putting it there.

They’re breathing it in like smoke.

09/02/2023

My issue with compliance-based methods.

You have assumed that my kid has made an intentional choice to not do the thing. You have assumed that they are entirely capable of doing the thing in this moment, but they have chosen not to. Based on this reasoning, all my kid needs is more rewards offered and more consequences given. Then they will learn to make the ‘right choice’, and just do the thing.

This is so incorrect.
As Dr Ross Greene says, kids do well if they can.

My kid WILL do the thing WHEN HE CAN.

When he doesn’t, it’s probably because he’s too dysregulated.
It’s probably because he has absolutely no mental energy left.
It could be because he’s had to mask hard all day and he’s got nothing left to give.
It could be because he can’t access his executive function skills in this moment.
It could be because he’s not ok inside.
It could be because he is too sad.
It could be because he is a perfectionist and doesn’t think he can do the thing perfectly right this minute.
It could be because his head is pounding from massive sensory overload.
It could be anxiety.
It could be because he has learnt that mistakes are punished here.
It could be that he is minutes away from shutting down.

It could be all these things.
When my kid doesn’t do the thing, it is because he can’t- not because he won’t.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that my kid just isn’t trying hard enough.

He tries so much harder than you will ever know.

Em 🌈
AuDHD SLP

09/12/2022

It has not been an easy decision to make but it is time for Teach. Play. Guide. to go into hibernation for a few years while I prioritise my family and our needs.

Although I will be pressing the pause button on providing supports, I am still here and always happy to chat and provide informal supports.

Next year I am heading back into the classroom part time and focusing on my boys, Raffael & Sammy.

Wishing each and everyone of you a relaxed end of year and a beautiful 2023.

Much love and thanks,
Jo