A few years ago, teachers from two of our centres went along to a workshop with Kimberley Crisp on play urges and loose parts. It was a genuinely good workshop, people came away buzzing, full of new language and new ways of seeing children's play.
But here's what I've learned since: a workshop, however good, is only the start. Attending isn't the same as understanding taking root in your everyday practice. What actually embeds an idea like this isn't the day you learn it, it's everything that happens afterwards, the ongoing conversation, the going back to it again and again, together.
For me, that happened through a closed Facebook page I set up for our teaching teams. Teachers were already writing genuinely meaningful learning stories, capturing learning that mattered to the tamariki in front of them, and that gave me something real to read through and recognise urges within. Some kaiako had already spotted an urge themselves and named it beautifully. Others had captured something wonderful without quite having the word for it yet, and I'd share that back, connecting it with what someone else had noticed, or with an example from a different centre altogether. What I remember most is the enthusiasm that came back, likes, comments, teachers building on each other's observations. It genuinely felt like we were working it out together, all of us noticing more than any one of us would have alone. Sometimes I wasn't sure myself what urge I was looking at, so I'd go and google it, the same as anyone would. That ongoing, curious, collaborative noticing, across our whole organisation, is what actually turned a workshop into something we lived by every day.
Before we get into what urges look like, it helps to understand why children can't simply be talked out of them.
We all know children learn through play, it's the foundation of everything we do. But it's worth understanding why play matters so much at a biological level, because it explains why urges can't simply be redirected away or waited out.
A baby's brain is only around a quarter of its eventual size at birth, and it takes about three years to reach most of its adult size. Everything a child needs for a lifetime of thinking, imagining and problem-solving is being built in that time, and play is the mechanism doing the building.
Pennie Brownlee, who wrote about this with Kimberley Crisp in The Sacred Urge to Play, describes the brain like a house going up. The foundations go in first, then the walls, then the roof, and you'd never dream of putting a roof on before the walls were finished. A child's brain unfolds in a similar order, and it needs the right conditions at each stage before it's ready for the next.
One of those conditions is a full emotional tank. A child who is stressed, overtired, or unsettled has all their energy tied up in feeling safe again, and there's nothing left over for curiosity or deep play. That's why nurture always has to come before play, not after it. Once a child feels safe and connected, their whole self is free to engage with the world, and that's when real play, and real learning, can happen.
There's a distinction I hadn't thought about clearly enough until recently, and while it hasn't changed what we offer tamariki, we've always believed in real, hands-on, sensory experiences, it's given me a much deeper way of thinking about why that matters so much.
We can tell a child that grass is prickly. That's information. But a child who has crawled through it, sat in it, rubbed it between their fingers, actually knows it's prickly, in their hands and body, not just in their head. That's knowledge, and it's a different, deeper thing entirely.
This is exactly why repetition matters so much in a child's play. When a toddler opens and shuts the same cupboard door over and over, she isn't stuck, she's building real knowledge, one repetition at a time.
Sometimes it doesn't even take repetition, just being there for the real thing. A swan plant grew big in one of our outdoor spaces, cocoons appearing everywhere, and a toddler sat down to paint the butterfly life cycle, not because anyone asked him to, but because the experience was right there in front of him, real and alive. That's knowledge, built from something he'd actually seen and lived alongside, not information handed to him second-hand.
Kimberley Crisp coined the word "urge" for a reason. These play patterns are visceral, not logical. They come from somewhere deep, and no amount of reasoning will make the pull go away. You cannot talk a toddler out of the urge to jump on the bed any more than you can talk yourself out of poking a fire with a stick.
Toddlers, in particular, are like little scientists. When a toddler repeats an action again and again, testing it, refining it, she's running an experiment, building the neural connections that let her make sense of her world. Her whole consciousness can lock onto the task so completely there's no "spare" attention left for anything else, a state sometimes called entrainment.
I learned this myself, the hard way, not so long ago. I walked into our sleep room and found a toddler shutting the door from inside, and without thinking twice, I picked her up and took her out to the main play area. In that moment, it was a genuine safety concern for me, a toddler alone shutting herself into a room wasn't something to leave unremarked, so I mentioned it to her teachers. It was only afterwards, sitting with it, that I started wondering if there was more to it. I shared what I'd seen on our Facebook page, and the comments that came back filled in the fuller picture, teachers had noticed her doing the very same thing in other parts of the centre, opening and shutting doors, again and again. She'd watched teachers do exactly this, and was simply exploring the same action herself, the way any of us would need to, to really understand something. That repetition across different places was what told us this wasn't a one-off, it was a genuine urge she was working through. Nothing about it was naughty, she was doing exactly what she needed to do to learn, even if my first instinct, quite rightly, was simply to keep her safe.
It's a good reminder that this learning can be so subtle, so easily missed, even by someone who's been in this work a long time. If we're not actively looking for it, we can walk right past a moment of real learning without knowing it.
Once you know what you're looking for, urges show up everywhere, and understanding which urge is in play changes what we do next. We can't stop the urge, so our job becomes redirecting it, not shutting it down.
We've seen a preschooler shift from throwing toy cars into a basketball hoop to throwing bean bags instead, the trajectory urge fully intact, just aimed somewhere safer. We've watched a toddler's fascination with opening and shutting things, best kept away from the art cupboards, find a perfectly good home in the family corner instead.
One tamaiti at one of our centres spent months, from February right through, quietly constructing, connecting blocks end to end, and enclosing little animals and vehicles inside. It was only when I went back through his whole portfolio that the pattern became obvious, not a single moment, but a sustained fascination that had been unfolding for months.
We've also watched a toddler lay scarves out by colour across the carpet during a music session that was meant to be about movement, then later sort spools into careful colour lines at the table, then arrange playdough shapes the same way again. Three completely different materials, the same quiet, deliberate patterning urge each time. And we've seen a kaiako narrate "on" and "off" for a toddler deep in posting yellow rings onto a stacking stick, feeding her the words while her hands were still busy, watching her then test the same idea on her own fingers, working out for herself, through trial and error, that a ring wouldn't balance on top of another.
Posting is one of those urges that doesn't stay put in one place either. My own granddaughter, nearly two and one of the older ones in her under-two room, was captured in a learning story posting balls through a hole in a tree stump outside, then bending down to see where they'd disappeared to, with three or four younger children bending down right alongside her, just as curious. At home, the same fascination turned up somewhere nobody had planned for, a hole in the speaker, with a set of her father's car keys posted in for good measure. If a child is genuinely into posting, they'll find a way to post, whatever's actually within reach.
Not every urge needs redirecting away from something, some can be met head on, with care. Fire is one of those urges, a fascination as old as humanity itself, and a sacred element in many cultures too. What we offer at Our Kids gives tamariki a safe way to outplay that fascination, lighting candles as part of our daily routines, sitting around a fire for Matariki, lighting diyas for Diwali. These are real, sensory experiences that create lasting memories and connect tamariki to tradition and ritual, and they show kaiako modelling respect and care around fire, kaitiakitanga in action.
Noticing an urge is only the beginning. What matters is helping a child's understanding deepen over time, and there's a lovely, simple way to think about how that happens.
It usually starts as pure physical action, a child moving, doing, repeating. Over time, that action starts appearing in mark-making or art. Later still, a child begins to understand cause and effect, that one thing depends on another. And eventually, they can put words to what they know.
Dr Anne Meade and Lauren Ryan, in their work on schema learning at Daisies Early Education and Care Centre, documented exactly this arc in a child fascinated by trajectory. He started out simply enjoying the swing and the slide, moved on to building train tracks, and eventually came to understand, and explain in his own words, that tracks need to connect for a train to get from A to B, and that a slope helps it gather speed. That's the whole arc, from something purely physical, to something he could finally put into language.
Once we understand this, our job becomes clear: we're not here to stop urges, we're here to resource them properly. There's a lovely, simple way to think it through: leave it alone if it's safe, redirect if it isn't, offer an alternative that still lets the urge play out, and always make sure there's genuinely enough of what's needed.
That last part matters more than we sometimes realise. Two pinecones won't satisfy a gathering urge, half a barrel will. One wheelbarrow is a recipe for conflict, half a dozen means a whole transport company can evolve. We'd learned, from Reggio-inspired thinking, that less is more, but understanding urges added an important nuance: less, but enough.
Enough also means enough of the right things, not just enough of one thing. A child exploring the transporting urge will want to try moving things in more than one way, a basket for some things, a wheelbarrow for others, a push chair for something else again. A construction area needs little animals, little people, and small cars tucked in among the blocks too, so children building aren't just constructing, they've got something to enclose inside what they've made.
I think of one of our kaiako who used to set up beautiful, carefully planned painting activities, lovely ideas, but ones that kept her so busy managing the process that she had little time left to actually observe the children's learning. Once we talked it through together, she began offering open-ended loose parts instead, materials that let the children lead the play themselves. Watching her make that shift, and knowing how much thought and care she'd already put into her teaching, was one of the most rewarding parts of mentoring I've done.
For a long time, I found dispositions like perseverance or curiosity hard to properly assess from a teacher's documentation. The words could be there, but it was hard to know if they reflected something real.
Urges changed that completely. The photos and videos told me so much, whether a genuine pattern was there, and whether it was deepening over time. And what I began to notice was that a single urge in a young child often grows, over the months and years, into three or four connected urges as they get older, constructing, connecting end to end, enclosing animals or vehicles inside their builds. And within all of that, the dispositions become visible too: collaboration as tamariki negotiate a build together, communication as they explain their plans, perseverance as a structure falls down and gets rebuilt again.
That's what mentoring around urges really became for me, not delivering a finished body of knowledge, but staying curious alongside my teachers, reading through documentation together, sometimes noticing something a kaiako had seen but hadn't yet named, sometimes needing to look something up myself. We were all learning, together, the whole way through.
A workshop can plant a seed. What actually makes it grow is what we do with each other afterwards.
References:
Brownlee, P. & Crisp, K. (2016). The Sacred Urge to Play. © Pennie Brownlee.
Meade, A. & Ryan, L. How Children Learn through Schemas. Daisies Early Education & Care Centre.
