Ep #57: Celebrating the Planning Playtime Community

Alright, Stephanie and Kara, welcome to the show, this is so fun. You guys always get to see the back end of it. Now you’re here in front with me and get to chat with me today. I’m so excited to get to do this episode with you.

Kara: I’m so excited to be here.

Stephanie: So excited.

Amy: This is so fun. So Planning Playtime, I get to be on the podcast and sometimes do stuff on social media. You guys see Stephanie on social media too. But this is a team effort here. And so it’s so fun to kind of get to bring the team together. And by the way, we like to have fun together because playtime is in our name, it’s kind of our jam. So it’s fun to bring the team together here. And we want to just kind of celebrate the end of the year by celebrating some of your stories that you guys send in, because really, that’s ultimately why we do what we do.

And we get to share them around here and Kara or Stephanie will post something beautiful that you guys send in. Sometimes we start bawling because we do that. But it’s just so special and significant and sometimes because we’re separated by a computer, we don’t always get to talk to you in person. And so it’s so fun to have you send in your stories on social media or emails or different things and we get to actually talk to you and see what’s happening in your lives. And it just inspires us to do even more of what we’re doing.

So we wanted to share some of our favorite stories. There’s so, so many that are sent in, but we wanted to just each pick a couple that touched our hearts and get to just share those as our kind of end of the year roundup. Does that sound good, ladies?

Kara: Absolutely.

Stephanie: Yeah, that sounds great. I’m excited to share some.

Amy: Those will be so good. So, Stephanie, why don’t you lead us out and share one of your favorite stories and just celebrate some of our community here at Planning Playtime?

Stephanie: Okay. So the first story that I want to share actually starts a few years ago when we very first launched Mommy and Me Preschool. We had two moms sign up. Their names are Susie and Jenna. And they were best friends. They actually went to high school together but weren’t really good friends then, didn’t really hang out much or know each other super well. But they ended up getting married and moving quite close to each other and both getting pregnant with little girls at the same time.

And Susie said from the moment they both found out they were pregnant with little girls, everything changed and they just were inseparable. So this is the beginning of 2020. And Susie was looking for something that she could do with her little girl and found Mommy and Me Preschool. And told her best friend Jenna about it and they both signed their little girls up. Their little girls’ names are Chloe and Anna. And little did they know that just a few months later the whole world would shut down and they weren’t going to be able to send their daughters to school.

But they had decided that they were going to do this homeschool thing and they were really excited about it. So they started the Mommy and Me Preschool program with their three year old daughters and immediately fell in love with it. They said that the time that they got to spend with their daughters is one of the most precious things that they could ever have expected. They never expected that, they knew that they were going to do preschool, but they had no idea the amazing things that it would bring.

So they did that first year of Mommy and Me Preschool during 2020, and then they even went on and did another year of Mommy and Me Pre K. And they both just have said amazing, amazing things. Well, first of all, Chloe and Anna are now seven and they are in first grade. And Jenna and Susie have said that the success that they are having now in first grade, they are attributing to Mommy and Me Preschool. So let me just read to you a couple little things that they said about Mommy and Me Preschool.

So this is Susie and she just says, “My experience with Planning Playtime and Mommy and Me Preschool is nothing short of amazing. The entire program made learning so much fun for my daughter Anna, and it created such an incredible bond between us. When I have people ask me how Anna is so advanced in school, I always credit the Planning Playtime program.” So then Susie also has a son. So this is kind of where this comes into today and now.

She has a son who will be in kindergarten next year and probably because she isn’t forced to homeschool she hasn’t been as on top of it with her son. And she messaged me actually a couple of weeks ago and said, “Stephanie, I am noticing a huge difference between where Anna was at, at this point and where my son is at now.” She’s like, “It is 100% because I have not been doing Mommy and Me Preschool with him. Do I still have access to everything?” And I told her, “Yes, of course you do. This is a lifetime member program. You get to do this forever if you want.”

And so she said that she is deciding that she needs to start now with him and that she still has half a year before he’ll go to kindergarten next year and that she just truly believes that Mommy and Me Preschool is what made the difference. She said, “My son is currently one year away from entering kindergarten and I did not homeschool him, and it definitely is starting to show.

I try very hard not to compare the two kids, but I definitely am noticing my son is lacking in many areas. So I pulled out my Mommy and Me material and started to dedicate an hour of home school program on top of what he’s learning in his preschool and it is very noticeable. It came to a point where his teacher approached me and asked what I was doing differently and I directed her over to the program.” She said, “The only regret I have is not dedicating the same Mommy and Me time to my son as I did to my daughter”, which is so cool.

Just amazing that she has these two kids that she can see the evidence right in front of her. how important that Mommy and Me Preschool was. And I personally believe that half of it is our amazing program but the other half of it is the time and attention that Mommy and Me Preschool provides for these kids and their parents. And just that dedication and that love and the time and energy that they get to spend together. Susie says that 2020 with her little girl, Anna, was literally the best year of their lives, which is also so cool because 2020 was hard for a lot of people.

And to have something so great come out of it is amazing. And now the second generation, Mommy and Me Preschool attendee in their home is [inaudible]. So that is one of my favorite stories from these past years of Mommy and Me Preschool. And we love Susie and Jenna and Chloe and Anna so much and are so glad that they joined us.

I’m going to just read really quick, something that Jenna said about her experience with Mommy and Me Preschool. She just said that, “Quality time with kids is so important. The time goes by way too fast. So enjoying that mommy and me time and teaching my daughter, there was nothing better. She says, I thank Mommy and Me Preschool so much for showing me I can do it all.”

Amy: I love it and I just love them and their cute girls and it’s just been so amazing to have them as a part of our community the last couple of years.

Kara: And Susie did reach out this week, she said, “I need help getting back in. I forgot how to log in.” And she was excited. And we have a lot of second generation Mommy and Me users. There’s a lot of people that contact us and say, “Hey, I used this two years ago and now I’m ready to use it with my next child. Can you help me get back into the program? Do I still have access? And yes, you have lifetime access, here you go.” And they’re excited.

Amy: And Kara’s on it, she’s going to help all of our people. You guys, Kara is a superstar, get everybody’s stuff taken care of. We love Kara. Alright, Kara, thank you so much, Stephanie, for sharing. By the way, I should have you introduce yourselves. Stephanie, tell everybody who you are and just what your role is at Planning Playtime.

Stephanie: Yeah, for sure. Alright, so I am Stephanie and I came to work at Planning Playtime at the end of 2019, somewhere around there, 2018.

Amy: Yeah, I think so.

Stephanie: I got to help kind of set up Mommy and Me Preschool and help write some of the content for that. That was kind of one of my biggest projects. So it is very near and dear to my heart for sure. And now I get to be the social media manager. So I get to connect with all of our amazing community members. And I get to really just show off all the amazing programs that we have. So it’s a lot of fun. I have a little girl named Chloe and she has just been my little sidekick throughout this whole thing. And it’s just been really, really fun to get to experience these programs together.

Amy: Love it, yeah. We’re so happy to have you on our team. You’re amazing.

Stephanie: Thank you.

Amy: Alright, we’re going to let Kara have a turn. So, Kara, introduce yourself, tell everybody what you do at Planning Playtime. And then we want to hear one of your favorite stories from our community this year.

Kara: So I came to Planning Playtime, I guess 2018. I was actually still teaching pre-K and was a customer. And started working part-time for Amy and then just continued to take on more and my roles changed. So I just take care of the day-to-day and keep Amy going and connect with Stephanie and just make sure that everybody has what they need. And Stephanie and I worked together with Amy to build that Mommy and Me program and I had stopped teaching at the time and I wished so much I was still in the classroom at the time to see that live in action because it has been something incredible to watch come to life.

And I have two kids, one’s in college and one’s in high school and they keep me busy.

Amy: Yeah, don’t they? It’s good times.

Kara: It is good times. So I actually have, I think, two stories. They’re both short, but I see a lot of feedback sometimes that not everybody the rest of the team sees. So I think one of my biggest and most favorite ones this year was from a special education teacher with our Play to Read program. If you’re not familiar with our Play to Read program, it’s a hands-on fun learning way to learn how to read it. It’s not your boring worksheets. It’s making the connection with Play-Doh and toys. And it really is a difference maker for a lot of these kids who are struggling to read and it takes the frustration and the tears out of that process.

And she sent an email to us and she said, “I just want you to know how much we love the Play to Read program. I am a self-contained special education teacher and it has been a crazy year of social and emotional needs. I finally have all the behaviors under control and the best moment came from a kindergarten and first grade student this week. They both have autism and run, hit, scream, spit and kick. Today for the first time they both came to the reading table and asked me if they could use Play-Doh to do some of the activities in the first lessons of Play to Read.

Up until now it’s been all about safety and compliance. But these two students, today they took the first step to learning and it was so incredible to see.” That’s just a snippet. We get a lot of stories like that, that our programs and our printables are difference makers for so many people. It is really cool to be a part of it and kind of like Stephanie said. We just provide part of it and it’s up to you to take it and run with it. But to know that we are taking something that traditionally has been truly painful teaching kids to read.

I mean I remember teaching mine, now teenagers, to read, and it was the worst and it was so boring and mundane. And if we had had this fun way to do it, especially with my ADHD kid, it would have been a game changer. There would have been a lot less tears, probably a lot less yelling and frustration from everybody. And our business is cool because we get to be a part of it and we have these amazing programs that do make a difference in these kids and these teachers’ lives and it warms your heart to hear these things.

And it’s kind of funny how our community, I think they have ESP, they know there might be some business things that are frustrating us and then damn we get an email or we get a post on Facebook that says, “Oh, my gosh, this is so awesome.” And it comes at just the right time and you can take a step back and realize, what we are doing matters and we are changing people’s lives with what we’re putting out there. And it’s cool to be just a little, teeny, tiny part of that.

Amy: I love the partnership of it. It is such a partnership. You both brought that up and I think that’s so beautiful that we just do a little piece and our teachers, our parents, whatever, they’re on the front row and then the kids put in their part too. And it’s just kind of this beautiful process where we all work together for the future of these kids. It’s amazing to get to be a part of that and I’m so grateful every day that we get to do this. It’s amazing. It was a beautiful story.

Kara: And I have one more from a mama. So we have our moms and we have our teachers but she was also a Play to Read user. But she reached out early in the fall and said, “I’m so grateful I found this program. I’ve been trying so hard to find a way to keep my daughter interested in learning to read. I purchased another program that was similar, but just so boring for her. We started the program last week and my daughter loves it. We played for almost an hour and she was learning and didn’t even know. She didn’t want to stop.

She laughed and smiled and gave me constant high fives the entire time. It was honestly the best time we’ve had together in a while.” We took that hard stuff and made it easy and doable and it’s just cool. That’s just it, it’s just cool.

Amy: How amazing is that? I feel like historically, I remember trying to teach my earliest kids to read and trying to use some of the phonics programs that were out there because I knew phonics mattered. But I just had what was available and it was a struggle, some of the time they did not love it. It was kind of a friction point instead of a joy space or a bonding time. And so I love that we’ve kind of been able to still keep the systematic phonics that we know, science has told us is so valuable, to be able to like turn it into bonding time. Oh, my gosh, how magical is that?

And now me, because my mom actually taught me to read. She was a retired teacher and did homeschool and so I remember way back before homeschool or school learning, how to read with my mom. And now that my mom has passed on. It’s one of the most beautiful memories from my early childhood that I have is that time with her and her teaching me to read. and my mom was the queen of play and that’s I think where I got it from. And she’s such an inspiration for why I started this movement in the first place.

So I love these stories because they’re connecting me back with my mom as well and it’s just really beautiful to see that. So good. Alright, can I share one? Do I get to share one?

Kara: Yeah, it’s your turn now.

Amy: So I want to share one. There’s so many and, you guys, it’s just so incredible and so inspiring because, man, life just throws some things at you sometimes. And so gosh, to get to feel like what you do for work makes a difference. It’s just such a beautiful and enriching thing. And so just thank you to every single person who takes time and gives that to us by sending us your stories of what this is doing for you and your children. Because that inspires us and motivates us to keep going and doing what we’re doing, so thank you for that.

One of my really neat opportunities this year has been to start recording podcast episodes with some of our people in our community that have used our programs. And it’s so fun and just amazing every time to get to have those conversations but one that stood out to me was my conversation with Angela. And Angela has been in our community for years as well and has done quite a few of our programs. But we were talking about her experience, and again she has multiple children, who have gone through the program.

We were talking about her oldest and she said that she kind of was doing this through COVID and then her daughter went back to public school and was in the classroom. And she is now encouraging her teacher and telling her how to add more play into their activities in their classroom. So she’ll go up to her teacher and be like, “Hey, what if we did it like this and we added some Play-Doh and some toys and whatever” and is coaching their classroom on how to make their learning in the school more fun, that just brought me so much joy.

And then she was talking about her second child, who’s now using the program who just has so much energy. And it is difficult to sit for periods of time and do a lot of repetitive learning tasks. And so she said, “It’s so amazing because this works so beautifully for my oldest but I was worried about the younger one maybe working beautifully.” And she says, “But it does because she has a frog and she just can get all of her wiggles out while doing her reading, doing the activities.” And so she talked about that and then just shared some of her personal story of she’s a teacher that’s now home.

But shared some personal stuff about her husband being illiterate and some of the challenges that that has. I mean we know it’s a challenge and the statistics are there but I just had never thought through the details of how much that would impact someone every single day. And she just talks about just the power of watching her girls learn to read and even her husband watching his girls learn to read and just being so grateful for that gift because, you guys, it is. It’s a gift to be able to read and write.

And so I just was so grateful to her and honor her for sharing that story with us and for her work to change that story for her children. And I’m just again, so grateful to get to be a part of it. What an honor to get to be a part of that, that journey for people. It was a good one. Stephanie, did you have another one?

Stephanie: I do and actually kind of my own story, so I hope that’s okay to kind of share a little bit of my take as a customer of Mommy and Me. Because even though I’ve been on the back end of it, I have been, I have been a mom who has been doing this program with my own daughter. So when I started Mommy and me Preschool, I mentioned I have a daughter named Chloe. She is six now but when I started doing Mommy and me Preschool with her, she was only two, she was only three, almost three.

We needed some social media content and I thought I have this adorable little girl with so much energy and she will be perfect for some of these things. And honestly, I went into it thinking that I was just going to use this for content. I thought she’s two, there’s no way she’s going to get any of this or that this is really going to be beneficial to her. But I started using the program with her and boy was I wrong. A couple of weeks in I realized that not only was she loving the program, but that she was learning.

And we ended up adding a couple of little friends to our group. We did a little Mommy and me Preschool co-op. And one of them was actually the daughter of my friend who was battling Stage 4 cancer. And so every day I got to have her little girl come over and join us. And I don’t know if I can read the text messages that my friend sent me about this, just because I will cry and not be able to get through them. But basically, she was just so grateful for a program that allowed her daughter to come and have some mommy time, even if it wasn’t with her specifically.

And so having this little group and having my little Chloe and my friend’s little girl. We just spent that year singing and reading and playing. And what I didn’t realize by the end of it was how much learning was happening as well. And I started shortly after we launched our Play to Read program with Chloe as well, again thinking, this is going to make some good videos for social media and this will be really, really fun to have. And again I don’t think I realized how beneficial it would be for her.

And just yesterday I went into her classroom and was working with some kids and I pulled Chloe back first because you always have to pull your own child first and we played this little game where there were a whole bunch of nonsense words on cards. There were just CVC words but nonsense words and you had to read the nonsense word in order to keep the card and you had to make matches with pictures. And I’d hand Chloe a card and she would sound out the word and read it. And I knew she could do that at home so that wasn’t surprising to me.

But I think what was surprising to me is in calling other kids back from the classroom, how many kids struggled with that, how many kids did not know how to do those simple beginning sound, vowel sound, ending sound words. And it’s kindergarten, they’ve got plenty of time. I don’t think anyone needs to worry if their kids are not able to do that by kindergarten. But it was very apparent to me how much the Play to Read program had prepared Chloe for that. And just how confident she was and how much she loved it. I could tell some of the kids were just a little hesitant to try and to read.

And Chloe, she just has all the confidence in the world of the Play to Read program. So I have a strong testimony of these programs. They work and they are just, they’re so great for building so many things. They’re great for academics and I think that is a lot of people’s first priorities when you’re looking for a preschool program or a reading program. But then they’re also really great for confidence building, and they’re really great to provide time to make the memories that you will have with your kids forever.

Amy: I’m trying to not bawl over here. And I just remember, yeah, you going through that experience with your beautiful friend and, oh, my goodness. And I didn’t know about those texts. So that’s just really sweet and just filled my heart today, so thank you for sharing that. That was so beautiful. You guys, thank you for coming on and doing this podcast with me. What a beautiful way to end our year and get to honor the work that we do and get to honor the work that all of our listeners are doing because they’re the front row. They’re the frontline doing the work with children every day.

And so it takes all of us and we get to be the community, the village for these kids. And so that’s just so beautiful so thank you for coming on and sharing some of those stories today. Thank you, everyone for sharing your stories and for all of the work that you do and letting us get to be a small part of that. We just are so grateful and honored to get to do that. And have an amazing, amazing rest of your year. And we will be back in the new year with lots of new and amazing things, yes?

Kara: Yes.

Stephanie: Yes, absolutely.

Don’t you just love all the fun things we’re learning on the show together? Well, we wanted to give you a chance to practice a little bit of it at home. And so we made you a special freebie just for being a listener here and you can grab it at planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. That is planningplaytime.com\special-freebie. So what this freebie is, I’ll tell you, is an amazing alphabet activity that you can start using with your kiddos and it is based in play and is so fun.

You can use dot markers with it, you can use Q-tip painting, you could use circle cereal. There’s all kinds of options, but you can print it out today and get started. Just head over to planningplaytime.com\special-freebie and we’ll send that to you right away.

Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website planningplaytime.com. See you next week.