0:00:00    Alyssa

You're listening to Voices of Your Village, and today I get to share a friend of mine with you. Dr. Patrick Makokoro is a social entrepreneur, an early childhood development practitioner, an educational researcher with extensive experience working in community and international development. I got to meet Patrick when we were both presenting at the World Forum for Early Childhood Education. I met him in Panama, and then we both bound up seeing each other again. We were selected as experts for UNESCO, for United Nations Education Congress, and there were nine experts selected globally, and he and I were each there and just ran into each other. He is a human who I love lea...

00:00:00    Alyssa

You're listening to Voices of Your Village, and I'm so stoked about this episode. We get to chat about rethinking weapon play. This is a hot topic. It's one with a lot of opinions, and I really wanted to dive into the child development aspect of this. I got to hang out with Kisa Marx and Samuel Broaden to have this conversation. Kisa is an author, a child advocate, and a champion of early educators. With over two decades in the field, she spent 15 years running her self -affirming play in nature focused family home childcare in Oak Park, Illinois. Recently, she switched to a nonprofit model to offer high quality childcare to families who would otherwise be denied ac...

00:00:00    Alyssa

You're listening to Voices of Your Village, and I got to hang out with Claudia Hammond to talk about why kindness matters and how do we teach it. One of the things I've been really into is this difference between being nice and being kind and what is kindness? How does it play out, not just in early childhood, but then down the road? What effects does it have on our mental health and the longevity of our mental health? I was so enriched by her research that it was really exciting to get to chat with her. She has a book out called The Keys to Kindness, and we got to chat about like, what does it look like to be kind to toddlers and to support tiny humans in building ...