It’s the start of a new school year, and if you teach preschool in Québec, you already know this tension: the classroom needs to feel warm and playful, but the curriculum is watching. The Ministry of Education’s revised Programme-cycle de l’éducation préscolaire actually settles that tension for us. Play isn’t positioned as a break from the real work — it’s named as one of the program’s three core orientations, alongside observing each child’s development and how we organize the classroom. The document is direct about it: play is the most natural context for a child to learn and grow.
On this episode of the ShiftED Podcast, I sat down with Stephanie Lord-Darby, an early childhood educator and program coordinator at GymbaROO-KindyROO in Australia, to talk about what that actually looks like day to day. Her big idea:
Movement isn’t a reward for finishing the “real” learning. It’s the warm-up that makes the real learning possible.
Stephanie calls it firing and wiring. Before a child can sit still and focus, their brain needs the physical experiences — crawling, climbing, balancing, reaching just a little past what’s comfortable — that build the neural pathways underneath everything else. She pointed to something as small as crossing the midline, a simple figure-eight movement, and the research suggesting it opens up more imaginative, fluent storytelling right afterward. Stillness, she argues, is actually a form of balance you build through movement, not the opposite of it. It’s a direct echo of the first area of development on our own preschool report card: physical and motor development isn’t a subject on its own, it’s the base the other four areas sit on.
She also told a story every Québec teacher will recognize the shape of: she tried to buy her five-year-old a pair of shoes with laces, and the store told her they don’t make laced shoes below a size 4 anymore, because kids can’t tie them. Her response: how are they supposed to learn if we never give them the shoelace? It’s the same question we ask about pencil grip, about scissors, about anything we’ve quietly stopped letting kids struggle with.
The part that connects most directly to our own preschool cycle program is what Stephanie calls provocation — setting up a few different entry points into the same theme (she used birds: feathers to touch, picture books, a nest and life-cycle table) and then stepping back. No rotation timer, no assigned stop. Kids choose where their curiosity takes them, and the teacher’s job shifts from directing the activity to asking good questions once they’re in it, and then gathering the group at the end to reflect on what everyone noticed. That’s not a lower bar than direct instruction — it’s a different kind of rigour, and it maps closely onto the ministry’s own play orientation, which frames play as the most natural context for a child’s learning and asks teachers to observe and support it rather than script the outcome in advance.
Her advice for the start of the year isn’t about routines or rules. It’s connection. A dysregulated child — coming off a summer with a parent, unsure why mom’s going back to work — isn’t ready to learn until they feel safe in the room. That’s the second area on the report card, building self-awareness, and the third, maintaining harmonious relationships with others: both start well before any academic content does. Build that sense of safety first, she says, and the rest of the year gets easier, not harder.
If you’re setting up your classroom this month, this conversation is worth the listen. Full episode of the ShiftED Podcast is up now at podcast.learnquebec.ca. For the full breakdown of the areas of development and the Québec Ministry of Education’s own resources on play, observation, and classroom organization, see the Preschool Education Cycle Program.
