Anji Play

Anji Play founder Ms. Cheng Xueqin describes the importance of teachers stepping back to understand and support the child.

Anji Play founder Ms. Cheng Xueqin describes an important role of the teacher.

You don’t need to ask a child how you should design a slide. Instead provide the child with the space, time, materials, and right to build the slide they need.

Materials have arrived @mundodeninoswi the incredible bilingual Anji Play Pilot Program founded and led by Kate Woodford @mskatecita

Originally we were controlling the child, and so the child we were seeing was not the true child. Once we liberated the true child, when we let them show us their true nature, it changed our entire educational ecosystem. The power of this change is impossible to estimate. -Ms. Cheng Xueqin

CANCELED EVENT True Play Check-in, Wednesday, August 12 at 10:00 AM Pacific Time, Emma Pickering, Early Years Lead at the British International School Budapest will join us to discuss her work with Anji Play and the transformation she has led in her early years program. This event is cancelled. ***This event will be rescheduled soon***

True Play Check-In #7: Jesse Coffino and Krystina Tapia of the True Play Foundation reflect with Peipei Yu, mother of two girls, ages 7 and 9, about her time with her children during California’s shelter-in-place, and how she came to re-evaluate a broader societal push for a narrow view of academic success.

Join us here tomorrow, Friday, August 7 at 10:00 AM Pacific Time for True Play Check-in #7 with parent Peipei Yu, who will discuss her shift towards embracing play and discovering her children during California’s shelter-in-place orders.

If you want to change, immediately make that change. If you want to change today, then put your hands down, put that into practice. I trust that once you have put your hands down, you will make brilliant discoveries, you will make brilliant changes. You will give children a blissful childhood. We can't wait. Today we can’t wait until tomorrow, and then tomorrow, wait until the day after tomorrow. You will wait for three years, and that most valuable period in a child's life ...will disappear in the process of all of your waiting. During the Play First Summit, Ms. Cheng shared the foundational ideas of Anji Play in her own voice. English transcript: https://docs.google.com//131PI8eU6UMF51CCg3GcZf_CyP1/edit Play First Summit: https://theplayfirstsummit.com

A reflection from renowned play innovator and materials designer Jay Beckwith on the recent Play First Summit: "The presenter that wrapped these ideas into a package that went beyond transformation to metamorphosis was that of Ms. Cheng. What she has created is a new 'meta' level by which the Anji Play method transforms teaching, teachers, and educational institutions." https://playgroundguru.wordpress.com//play-and-metamorpho/

Excerpt from Jesse Coffino's opening remarks at Defending the Early Years Summer Institute 2020 In describing the history of the development of her approach, Anji Play, Ms. Cheng describes the challenges of showing a hesitant group of educators and traditionally-minded families how a self-directed, self-initiated, self-determined experience of play is the deepest and most complex form of learning. She did this through listening, through sharing and through systems of reflecti...on. But Ms. Cheng has also confided in me that her much more difficult struggle took place between 1999 and 2006 when she had first taken the position of county administrator of early education. During this period she fought to stop the privatization of public early education in her county, facing pernicious vested interests who literally threatened her life. During this period she separated public ECE budgets from primary school administration, created separate legal entities for public ECE programs, brought ECE teacher pay in line with that of primary school teachers, took out personal loans to repurchase schools in the public name, and, through a series of innovative policies, created 130 fully-inclusive public ECE programs that provide universal access for the children in her county. When she began her work in 1999, there were only four public early childhood programs, and nearly 200 private operators in Anji County. Today there are only four private operators, and all of them practice the Anji Play approach. Ms. Cheng’s work and life have been driven by a radical commitment to equity and liberation, whether in creating safe school spaces for left behind children, children whose parents had left the county in search of work, leaving these children in the care of their grandparents, or for the children of migrant laborers in Anji who are so often excluded from public schooling in China, or for neuro-diverse children who take part fully in a curriculum that honors their right to be seen and heard with respect and to express autonomy in their discovery of the world and themselves. This commitment is also why in our work globally and in the United States, we are focused almost exclusively on community-based programs, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, library programs, and other programs that are focused on providing love, risk, joy, engagement and reflection to children most often systematically denied these rights. I mention this bit of history and orientation, before I share our views about play at this moment, because our support for DEY is not merely an affinity for play, but a deep commitment to a broader mission, a commitment to equity, to freedom from the pernicious, vested interests of unfettered capitalism, and to the liberation of both children, teachers and communities from the top-down imposition of systems of exploitation. Full remarks: https://docs.google.com//1uxMWp6oK3n84tp99M5Xqhl8Lax/edit Full video at Defending the Early Years

Defending the Early Years' annual Institute where early childhood educators, advocates, parents and child development experts come together to educate, agitate and organize in order to protect the rights and needs of children.

When materials are stored and organized in a way that allow the child total mastery of their management, and when transitions follow the child’s need for time, clean up is also the joy of self-determination, and we can continuously discover the child’s ability.