Imagine transforming the world of speech therapy by bringing it outdoors and combining it with the joys of preschool! That’s exactly what Lisa Boyce has done with her unique outdoor preschool, Garden Gate Preschool.

When Lisa moved her preschool outdoors during Covid, she discovered how much better children became at self regulation. In fact, the results were so fantastic she decided to keep her preschool outside.

 Here are some topics we explore in this interview:

• Outdoor learning environments and emotional regulation
• The power of child lead unstructured play
• Teaching phonological awareness in preschool
• How to set up an outdoor preschool

That’s only a small sample of what we cover. You’ll want to hear how Lisa utilizes real-world experiences – like the annual grape harvest at the preschool — to promote learning. And her use of glitter jars for social emotional learning is something I can’t wait to try in my practice! Tune into episode 90 of The Speech Umbrella, Harnessing the Power of Play in Speech Therapy with Lisa Boyce, and come away inspired.

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: [00:00:00] 

Welcome to the Speech Umbrella podcast. Today I’m taking you on a field trip to one of the most fantastic settings for speech and language therapy I’ve ever seen. Lisa Boyce is an S L P who has an outdoor preschool, and today she has invited me into her preschool to interview her about all the things that she does to encourage speech and language development in children in an outdoor setting.[00:01:00] 

I’m sitting here and Lisa’s outdoor preschool called Garden Gate Preschool. That’s why we hear birds twittering and some dogs barking. This is lovely. This is a lovely setting and I want to introduce Lisa Boyce, who is an SLP who runs this outdoor preschool. It’s a combined preschool with typically developing children and children who have speech and language needs. 

Lisa Boyce: That’s right. 

Denise: And so Lisa’s gonna tell us all about this fantastic model she has for an outdoor preschool. Lisa, thank you so much for doing the podcast with me. I know I’ve been trying to track you down for a year and a half. 

Lisa Boyce: I’m sorry. I’m so thrilled this is working and today’s a beautiful day for it. 

Denise: It is, and I’m so glad we got to talk with you and I think the listeners are going to love, love this podcast. So Lisa, what interested you in becoming an SLP? 

Lisa Boyce: Well, it’s funny. I had changed my major several times in college as an undergraduate student, and one day I found myself reading what used to be the course catalog.

It was this huge phone book looking [00:02:00] thing with every major and all the classes. And I’d never heard of SLPs. Uh, somehow I’d made it into my early to mid twenties without even knowing that it existed. And so as I was reading through each class, every one of ’em was interesting to me, and so I took just an intro to speech language pathology class to see what that would be like and we went on like a tour of different clinical settings- to the hospital, to the schools, to a private practice, to a skilled nursing facility. And every one of them was so exciting for me. I just, I loved it and I thought, okay, this is it. So I switched .

I had done a lot of work to be a humanities major and so then, I signed off a lot of the kind of general requirements using all of the language and not the science, and I had to go back and redo a lot of that. But that’s kind of, I just stumbled on in the manual. 

Denise: After you got your degree, describe your career path from the beginning to how [00:03:00] you ended up with this outdoor preschool. 

Lisa Boyce: Oh, great. Well, my first placement, I took my clinical fellowship year in a skilled nursing facility in a rehab facility up in Sandy, Utah. and I loved it. I loved, I felt like the thing I felt the least confident about coming out of my master’s program was sort of the more medical side of the practice. And I thought if I don’t do my clinical fellowship in that setting, I might never feel like it’s an option for me. And so I did that and I loved it. I was there for a couple of years, and then I, had my first child and we moved to Boston.

So from there, I worked just per diem. After that for many years, and I did six months actually in a public school preschool there covering for someone who was out on medical leave. And I would just take shifts in all sorts of settings and I continued to do my continuing ed and licensure.

When my fourth child was [00:04:00] little, I started doing some private practice in my home and I only saw like three clients at a time. But I just picked a day I wanted to not be so far away from clinical practice that I wouldn’t feel like I could go back to it eventually. During that time I, worked in co-op preschools with my kids, and I would often do per diem work in the public kindergarten classrooms. 

And the Belmont public schools are spectacular and I started to accumulate what I felt were best practices from the teachers there. As well as watching what the SLPs were doing. They had a lot of funding and a lot of resources, and I just started keeping a file of all the things that I loved, that I saw people do, and the ways they approached speech and language, and listening and reading and writing for those littles.

Then we moved to Silicon Valley and we were in the Bay Area for a few years, and that’s when I started my first official preschool [00:05:00] where I got licensed and I set that up in my home. It was my garage cuz in Silicon Valley it’s very expensive to live. I turned that into a classroom setting.

I took eight kids and three of them had speech and language needs and I did that twice a week. And that was sort of the prototype of an official, kind of more clinical approach to this. And I, I just fell in love. I saw my speech clients just soar in terms of the benefits of working on their goals in a natural play context.

And I just, I mean, the problem was they would move off my caseload early into the year sometimes, and then I would have just a preschool and I’d have to be finding new speech clients and adding. So by the end of that year, I ended up with 12 students, even though I started with eight because I had discharged the speech kids in the classroom and I had a teacher working who was an early childhood educator and then I pushed in as the SLP.

But really we were partners in developing curriculum [00:06:00] and, pretty much creating the model. That’s what I do now. So when we moved here to Utah, I took a couple years off because I had a couple kids struggling with the transition and I, you know, I had kids from kindergarten up through high school that first year here.

And then it’s been five years now since Garden Gate preschool opened and, I love it. I love the way it supports my private practice. I see each of my private clients, that’s a preschool age, comes also to preschool. So I pull them out once a week. I see them for 30 minutes and just do one-on-one. It’s like taking a highlighter to everything we’re doing. And then they’ll come to preschool. I have two classes that each come twice a week, they’ll come to school. And I have two other teachers with me. And we all know each week the goals for each, child who’s on my caseload and how we’re gonna target those in anything we’re doing, any center, any part of our learning throughout the week.

So it’s fun. 

Denise: What gave you the idea to make it an [00:07:00] outdoor preschool? 

Lisa Boyce: Well, I, you know, in New England there’s a lot of kind of forest schools that are modeled after sort of some European models of learning that now are actually becoming more prevalent in the US, there’s a lot of research right now, and I don’t know if it’s a trend or something that will last in terms of outdoor education and nature education.

But I had seen those and I kind of always romanticized how cool they would be. But you needed a forest to do that. I didn’t have a forest. 

Denise: We’re in the west. 

Lisa Boyce: Yeah, and so I always saw the value also, of course, of getting our kids outside. And I would read articles about child development and just see how important that was.

And so we always came outside for part of our preschool day, but when Covid I hit, I just really didn’t want to shut down. I did in March of 2020, you know, we closed everything. But for the next fall, I just believed we could figure it out and so, we did. I was really clear with [00:08:00] parents of what I would and wouldn’t be able to control in terms of, instead of sharing materials, every kid had their own caddy of their own materials.

We wore masks, even outside for a while, just because a couple of our kids were really high risk health wise. But I said to parents, you know, I won’t sterilize the sandbox toys and I’m not gonna be able to do more than Lysol the dress up. So you can determine what risks you can tolerate with whether you can send your child here or not.

But we’re gonna be outside until we can’t. And I, I really worried my yard has a lot of space and a lot of spread out interesting play spaces. I worried about, you know I already struggled sometimes to keep, you know, a child with us during our circle time or coming to the center, and I thought, I’ll never be able to control anything out here.

So it took a huge leap of faith for me. I read as much as I could. I did as much research as possible, and then it was so magical. One week in, I already knew [00:09:00] that this was the exact opposite of what I thought would happen would happen. My kids with ADHD attended more deeply. We actually played, we had calmer play, more deep play, more focus, way more of language and literacy happening out outside.

It’s hard to explain it, but the behavioral issues came under control so quickly. Self-regulation, executive functioning, all of that was supported by the outdoor classroom, like I just was remarkable. I’ll never go back. So we stay out until -this year was a hard winter in Utah. So we actually started going inside for part of our day mid-November, but we had been in the snow outside for a while and you know, kids will freeze and cry for about the first day they come unprepared. And I do have a playhouse with the heater and they can opt to just kind of hang out in there most of the time. But they need to join us for part of that work that we’re doing.

And, so, and I [00:10:00] always have hand warmers and backup gear. I keep a little bucket full of those things for someone who’s not prepared, but they usually only come in the wrong shoes, or without mittens once and then they realize that they had to stay out anyway and then they bring them the next time. So yeah.

Denise: The preschool starts like in August? Yeah. 

Lisa Boyce: We start the week after the public schools. 

Denise: And they’re outside until you have to come in like mid-November. 

Lisa Boyce: Yeah. And then we still go out in- all the way through winter this year, we decided, unless it was below about 17 or 18 degrees, we were out for almost an hour of our time.

And a significant part of our inside time is then spent on sequencing in terms of how to get dressed and undressed with our winter gear. Right. They have a song, they know the order. Cuz if you put your gloves on before you put, you know, your boots on, you can’t get your boots on. And so there’s a lot of time spent, but I think ready for kindergarten looks like a kid who can put their own snow gear on.

So I think that’s a fine thing for us to [00:11:00] spend time on. But yeah, we go out all year, but we were out until -this year, there was a lot of snow that lasted into spring. And we were doing this really fun authors and artists unit and we decided to create an art museum with all of our different authors and artists inside.

And so we stayed out until April, which I haven’t done before, but after spring break we were back out full-time. 

Denise: Sounds like my kind of preschool . 

Lisa Boyce: It was really fun. Fun. 

Denise: I am a gardener. 

Lisa Boyce: It’s pretty magical. Yeah.

Denise: Just magical. I love that you’re seeing progress in executive function and attention. 

Lisa Boyce: Yeah. 

Denise: Because really 90% of our clients have those issues.

Lisa Boyce: They do. 

Denise: You rarely get a child who is speech only really focused. -. Corrects it with your little bit of intervention. I mean, they have these underlying – executive function issues.

Lisa Boyce: Well, and we see a lot of neurodivergence right now with our learners, whether they’re diagnosed as autistic or not, and post covid, I think there’s been a real [00:12:00] shift in terms of emotional regulation and executive functioning and social interaction and that social and emotional peace. And so, we have had to do a lot more intentional work just since Covid and I don’t know if it’s a combination of what happened with everyone kind of isolating and or just in general there’s a climate that’s a little more argumentative amongst adults and kids absorb the worries and the anxieties of the adults around them. But in 30 years of being with preschoolers, I saw such a marked difference for every child, whether they were on my caseload or not, coming in post covid and, and we’ve had to shift the way we do things.

Denise: I am seeing more preschoolers who want to negotiate with me. -. To escape from doing the hard things and I, don’t do that. I don’t negotiate. I try and make it as fun as possible for you, but you gotta do the hard things and there’s more pushback than there used to be. 

Lisa Boyce: Yeah, for sure. And a lot of [00:13:00] meltdowns, right?

And you don’t get to the learning if you’re disregulated emotionally. So, yeah.

Denise: I wanna move on to talking about how you target goals, how you work on the goals in this preschool setting. I know you do, do their individual work with them, but you also address their goals in the group. 

Lisa Boyce: Right. So first I, I have to always, every morning before preschool look through and remind myself which kids are here today and where specifically are we.

So that requires me to do a good job documenting during my private therapy time with those kids exactly where we are. What did we accomplish that week? During my 30 minutes, just one-on-one with that student, which is on a separate time than preschool. I don’t, when I first started this, I actually tried to pull my kids out during that preschool day, and I found that I could do that, but every other kid wanted to come, which was kind of fun but then I went, I just really wanted to, hit hard on the thing we’re doing [00:14:00] right, in a more controlled way. Mm-hmm. , in a, maybe a less child led way for a while, so that I made sure that we were doing it correctly and we weren’t gonna practice incorrectly. And, , all of that. So I review exactly what each of my speech kids is doing, and then I send a summary of that out every morning and a text to my other teachers.

I have two other teachers here. One is a licensed teacher and one is an assistant, and so they just have it in their mind a little bit, what each child is working on. And then I do a couple of things during our morning meetings. It depends of course, on what kind of goal it is. I will often create, a learning experience that’s a shared group learning experience that supports just one goal.

So, for example, if we’re learning about the farm and we’re doing farm research, cuz we’re gonna create a farm here, so the parents can, we always bring the parents on a field trip to us. So we build the ocean aquarium or the rainforest or the farm. So they’ve done their research and we’re gonna build the farm and we’re talking about [00:15:00] horses and we need horses.

And I’ve got a child who’s working on, and having a really hard time with subjective pronouns, for example. Then in our group setting, I’ve got a little horse and we do a fun game, and then everyone’s taking a turn. He’s riding the horse. She’s riding the horse. They’re riding the horse. Who’s riding the horse? And we might have a song about it.

And there’s a, at least, you know, 30 models of it. And I only do that in the group setting if we’ve hit it to 90% accuracy, one-on-one first, because then I know they’re gonna succeed in that setting in front of their peers. And they’re more likely to take that risk to spontaneously, or when they’re asked, to produce this target thing we’re working on and then usually, whatever the thing is, we get them producing it, we get everyone modeling it, and it allows us to expand to the next kind of place you’re gonna go in your private therapy time. So this might work also with sounds. So if someone is working on, you [00:16:00] know, Minimal pairs with p and b, and we’ve got a bag full of Santa’s toys that we need to sort for the chimneys.

And there’s a P chimney and a B chimney. And I have a bunch of objects in the toy sack, right? And I know they can do it at a word level. So in our group setting, everyone who’s in that context and is delivering toys for Santa is gonna pull the toy out. And there, you know, my child’s gonna go first. My speech kid is gonna go first and they’re gonna sort the toys.

And then I might have a different bag for each kid, And I have, you know, usually a lot of chimneys, depending on how many kids sounds we’re working on, but they can already do word level and then we’re still saying a phrase like, yeah, that pig went to the P house, you know, and then you can get a phrase and a sentence and conversation in there.

But they just have to pull it out and go pig, you know? And we’ll talk about, cuz we’ve all done that in our group. What, remind me about P, and someone will say, that’s a quiet lip puffing sound. Yeah, your voice is off. Is your voice on or off? And, and they’re all reinforcing what we already all know about [00:17:00] how you say P.

And so then they put that by the P chimney. Right? And so they could even be at an isolation level and still participate in that same group work, but in isolation. First I wanna get them 90 to 95% there, before I then move that into what we’re doing in a preschool setting. And so really almost any activity can support almost any goal.

Cuz you could have vocab in there and you could have colors on there, and you can work it into a narrative setting and then you can talk about the characters. And so, so really there are ways you can get every goal into the same set of activities, right? Playdough and a bunch of loose parts can work on any goal.

Denise: Yeah. Playdough can do anything! 

Lisa Boyce: Right?

Denise: I love playdough. 

Lisa Boyce: I do too. It never gets old. This week we were doing dragons love tacos and so I made Taco playdough with taco seasoning. Right. And then they were building tacos with different language vocabulary, whatever. Like we had animal tacos and we had color tacos and we had [00:18:00] shape tacos and you know, anyway, so playdough is the best.

Denise: That’s a great idea. I might have to make playdough tacos 

Lisa Boyce: or pizza pizza’s so great cuz you can do categories of pizzas. Mm-hmm. You can have. Order an animal pizza and then they have to come up with different animals or fish pizzas or whatever. Yeah.

Denise: I’m really interested in what you do for the whole preschool as far as supporting early literacy. Reading phonemic awareness, phonological awareness. 

Lisa Boyce: Thank you for asking about that. So when I was in Boston in the mid nineties, I was introduced to a curriculum that was developed by an SLP, Nancy, I think her last name is pronounced Telian, and it’s this lively letters curriculum. And it’s part of this, I think it’s called Reading with TLC. I purchased the curriculum the very first year I watched her do it, and I’ve updated it over the years as they’ve updated it since the mid nineties.

But our whole class does this, and this is a way we introduce [00:19:00] sounds and letters, with -and it’s, you know, multisensory, it, it follows a developmental path and the science of reading, they’ve really refined it, and so I, I have a couple cards that I brought out to show you how we start learning different letters as a class.

And we do these every day in the group. And by mid-year they know all the sounds with the letters. They’re so quick at recognizing them, not just when they see the letter, but when they hear the letter. And so they’re encoding and decoding. So this is part of what I do. So you know, we have a P and a B here and you know, the P -there’s a song and they love the song that goes with them. So the P you know, it starts by, first we’re just saying P, and we have a group conversation. What is happening when you say, P, what is your mouth doing? And someone will eventually say, well, I’m putting my lips together like that.

You are right. Your, [00:20:00] your lips are together. And then what happens? P, put your hand in front of your mouth puff. Can you feel air coming out? Yeah. Is it just soft air or is it like exposed? P? It’s puffing like, so then, and then we talk a lot about figuring out if our voice is on or our voice is off, and then they’ll figure out eventually, and they’ll generate the definition every time.

I’m always amazed they get it with almost the exact wording I want them to, which is, this is a quiet lip puffing sound. And we do the same way with but which is a noisy lip puffing sound. And then the songs go, this is the mom. She does not wanna wake up that baby when it’s sleeping. So this is up. Why this? Circle the curve cuz all preschool writing is just lines and curves. I tell ’em all the time, it’s just lines and curves. You just make lines and curves. And if I can’t read it cuz I’m a grownup and you have perfect preschool spelling, then you tell me what it says and I’ll be your editor and I’ll write it underneath, right?

So they know this is a line with a curve at the top and the lips come [00:21:00] first. P So the line comes first. So this is gonna translate when they’re writing, when they’re older, right? Because they know, oh yeah, my lips go P. So the circle doesn’t go that they just, it really helps them learn that. And the baby is so noisy and you know the song is about how much noise the baby makes and , and so they know the difference between P and B, and so we’ll do it with print, but we also just do it with sounds we heard. And someone will be like, we’ll be playing a thing. And they’ll, they’ll say something and they’ll go, Hey, that’s P, that’s a quiet lip puffing sound like they’re so excited that they’re recognizing it from just a speech stream. Right? And so I use this, this is, I have a little buddy right now that’s working on this.

So this is a dragon and he, he puts his teeth on his lip. But his lip is on fire. He has to blow it out, Fffff. So his head kind of comes forward and he blows out that fire. His voice is off, you know? Then there’s a vampire when his voice is on, and, and so, you know, we do a lot of Ffff, and they have like Fff , [00:22:00] and they know, like they’ve discovered before I ever show them the picture.

And we just start with the sound Ffff. Where’s your mouth when you do that? So then if you’re saying Sssss, I’ll say, wait, is your, are your teeth on your lips when you go Ssss? You know, because Sssss, won’t get that fire out. Well, you need to really get the fire out. And so then that translates quicker into, you know, words like, so then instead of sued, they get to food a lot faster because they’ve just got a visual and a song and a cue, and they’ve discovered what their articulators are doing.

When they make the sound. So we use that a lot. And pretty soon, partway through the year, I have smaller versions of them. We’ll be playing a memory matching game and they flip it and they make the sound, or we make a piano. I’ll do the whole steps under the grape arbor with every one of these big cards, and they get to be the piano player and they have a pointer and they point, and everyone makes the sound and they play the piano and everyone makes the sound, and so then that’s, that’s part of that. And then we do [00:23:00] tons of, rhyming and we’ll do that in songs. You know, like this week we were doing the song down By The Bay and one of my friends just was like, you know, bless her, she’s like, have you ever seen a mouse eating a cheese? And then, you know, everyone’s like, yeah, mouse. Mice like to eat cheese, but let’s remember what we know about a rhyme, mouse. Pick one of these. Pick one of these sounds. Remember if you move them M of mouse and you put the P mouse, cuz it can be an alien word. It can be. And then she finally can say, you ever seen a mouse eating a pouse, and then we’re laughing as an alien word, you know, whatever.

But they’re just getting this idea that you switch out sounds, it changes words and meanings and so then lots of, lots of rhyming. I line them up to go inside sometimes in the winter and I’ll say the first kid gets to pick something outta my little apron pocket and it’ll be like, dog. And then I’ll tap each kid on the head as they go past me and [00:24:00] they have to rhyme with dog.

So dog hog, frog, bog. And then pretty soon they can’t remember the sounds and so then they’re just doing alien words cuz they know what their choices are at least, and so they can do rhyming. So we do a lot of that. 

Denise: I love, love that work on rhyming because I found that kids who are language impaired need so much exposure.

Yeah, so much exposure to figure out. That they’re switching out the first sound and keeping the last the same and their, their ability to remember what the first sound was, what the last sounds are. It’s just really hard. 

Lisa Boyce: It’s so hard to do.

Denise: So you did tell me once about how you do some, I dunno if you call it mindfulness, you know, with your kids. 

Lisa Boyce: Yes, we do. We do a lot of mindfulness. During our preschool day we have a time that’s mindfulness and movement. And so we’ll do a combination of sort of some gross motor games, but we usually start and end with either yoga or some kind of mindfulness [00:25:00] activity. and they need that and they love it. It centers them for the rest of their learning. Right. And they have one time we had a, we always start with a story at the beginning of the year about this little buddy who learns that he has to stop, take three breaths and think of a solution, and they make a bracelet that some of them wore all year and they kind of have a red bead and then they pick three colors for their three breaths and then a green bead, and it’s this like visual reminder. So we’ll do some of that. But the thing we do the most, which we introduce during our very first day of morning meeting is we talk about swirling glitter. We’re always talking about emotions, our emotions, characters in a book theory of mind work, but the very first day we identify that we all feel a lot of emotions and we’ll label them and we’ll try to think what is our body doing when we feel this emotion? And as soon as we get to the emotion of either [00:26:00] mad or we’ll come up with, what is that word? Like maybe it’s frustrated or you know, upset, some of them are angry, whatever it is, we start talking about how like, your brain feels, and your heart might be beating faster and you see like your muscles are tighter.

And so then I introduce a glitter jar and later that day we’ll make little, not glass, glitter jars that they get to take home as a reminder, but I, I have them because we’re also learning about viscosity, which they probably won’t ever remember. Some of them do. But we have glitter in water and we have glitter, this one’s in, I think this is a little bit of clear glue and water. So this glitter jar. We talk about when your glitter is swirling. This is like your brain is. Your brain, you can tell is super worried, and your heart is going so fast and your muscles feel really tight, and your glitter is just swirling, and you cannot solve a problem in a glitter storm. You have to calm your glitter first. So we practice and we take some [00:27:00] breaths together until our glitter is calm, then. We can figure out what to do, but we cannot figure out what to do. Someone is on the swing and you were planning to go to the swings, and when you got there, someone got on right before you, but you had been planning it all the way through centers and now you want to push them off the swing, right?

And so you’re in, this is a glitter storm. And so then we will sit by the swing after maybe you have pushed them off the swing, and we’ll talk about calming our glitter first before we even identify you can’t push someone off the swing. We have to calm our glitter. Cuz you cannot learn or solve a problem or even make great choices in a glitter storm, which as a parent has been a good reminder for me.

But the glitter in this jar, it does not slow down very quickly because sometimes those feelings hold on longer and you have to have other tools. So then throughout the year we’re working on tools to calm our glitter when we [00:28:00] can just do it with a few deep breaths or sometimes you need to go and draw a picture by yourself for a few minutes, or play with some playdough alone or just with a teacher.

Until then, you can have a conversation about why we don’t spit in someone’s face, or what do you do when someone knocks your tower down, you know, that kind of thing. So that coupled with some of the work we’ll do during our like, yoga and, kind of PE stuff really has helped for me with emotional regulation and social and emotional learning.

We also talk a lot about thinking with our eyes. We learn about our tools as scientists, and one of them we talk about is our eyes. And we have to realize you can think with your eyes, right? And so that’s that social piece. Well, what? Hold on. Look at their face. Can you be a reader of their face with your eyes?

What, what do you read right now? Did they, like when you knocked that over, do they look happy or sad? They look sad. [00:29:00] Why do you think they look sad? Cuz I knocked it over. Did you wanna make ’em sad? No, I just wanted to knock it over. Okay. But now they’re sad. What can you do? And then, because our calm, our glitter’s calm and they’re reading social cues, their, you know, and that’s inferencing.

It’s all of these great things around social and emotional support. We don’t learn anything else when we’re disregulated. So.

Denise: I love those two glitter jars. So for those of you who are listening, Lisa has got a jar full of water and glitter. Yeah. That’s the one that just swirls around, but calms down pretty fast.

And the other jar that has some clear glue and water. Yeah. And that’s the one where the glitter kind of stays suspended. 

Lisa Boyce: Yes. 

Denise: For a longer time. 

Lisa Boyce: Takes a, takes a while to calm that glitter. But it, it does eventually settle and sometimes we’ll even have to leave it and come back. And we talk about how sometimes you have to leave a situation and do something else and come back.

Denise: Now, Lisa told me several months ago about grape harvest in her outdoor [00:30:00] preschool. Now this just is so delightful. I just laughed. Tell us about the grapes. 

Lisa Boyce: Okay, so we have an arbor in our yard that, it has grapes growing all over it and we sit under that grape arbor for our morning meeting and for sharing time and for our lively letters every day.

So we have at least three meetings under the grapes and we watch them in the fall, get bigger and they’ll, they’ll taste them on the first day in August. Someone always wants to try the grapes and they’re a little tart. And then by the end of September or October, depending on the rainfall that year, we decide as kids that the grapes are ready.

And so they come on Grape Harvest Day, and I remind the parents, which I have to do anyway, we do not send kids to preschool in cute clothes because we are gonna get dirty. We are gonna paint, we’re gonna glue, we’re gonna glitter. Sometimes we even learn and use sharpies like, we’re in the mud. You cannot come in really nice, cute, [00:31:00] preschool clothes. But on grape day especially, do not come in nice clothes. So I have a ladder and we have buckets, and we have scissors, and they sit on chairs and watch. So one smaller group comes at a time over to harvest, and they climb the ladder and I climb the ladder.

And so I’m standing, kind of just below them and reaching around them with both arms so that they’re really safe upon that ladder. And then they cut down bunches of grapes and we fill the bucket and they take turns and a lot of them will just come watch each other, harvest the grapes. And then we set up our grape stomping procedure and that requires quite a few buckets or bins cuz we have, a soapy water bin, a clear water bin, the grape bin, and then a clear water bin, and towels on both ends and they take their socks and shoes off and they roll up their pants. And some of your [00:32:00] kids with sensory integration trouble are not gonna step in the grapes. And we tell ’em right up front, you don’t have to step in the grapes, but we want you to help us squish the grapes.

So I have Ziploc bags. And I will put a scoop of grapes into that. And so someone could be sitting and just popping grapes open with their fingers and watching the juice run out. Cause we talk about why do we step on the grapes? What does this do for making grape juice? So we stomp on these grapes, and then we will strain, we’ll pull out all the sticks and leaves that got in there.

We will strain ’em through different size strainers and eventually cheese cloth, and then we boil it. But I always actually use a steamer, which is a really fast way to make grape juice, the days before, the weekend before. And I pre-make grape juice for them to take home. And we do cook and do the whole thing together.

But that grape juice is boiling for a long time, so they’re not gonna take that home. And the first year I just said, here’s your grape juice. And then they were like, teacher Lisa, you’re lying. Our grape [00:33:00] juice couldn’t be cold in this jar right now. I was like, okay. Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to trick you. Like I forgot to tell you the part that says your grape juice is still cooking, but this is the same grapes and you know, anyway, so now we’re really clear up front you’re gonna take home grape juice. It won’t be the grape juice you stomped, and then when they come back they can see the color and how it changes cuz it looks pretty disgusting before you boil it, after they’ve stomped on it, especially. And it’s slippery in there and so you have to kind of hold their hands while they stomp. And some of them will just put a toe in and some of them are jumping up and down and it’s splashing and juice is splattering and you learn a lot early in the fall about your kids and, risks they take and also kind of how they process different senses.

It’s fun. And delicious. 

Denise: It sounds like the best day of the year. 

Lisa Boyce: It is, yeah. 

Denise: What advice do you have for a speech therapist who would want to start an outdoor preschool?[00:34:00] 

Lisa Boyce: The first thing I would say is do your research on city codes. Like I have a major in-home use permit, but that was a process and you have to have, site plans and architecture.

I mean, you have to put together quite a bit of documentation and then you have to notify everyone within a certain distance of your home and have a public meeting. And, , someone from the city comes to that with you and then you have a hearing and it’s not, it’s a different kind of hearing, but again, they notify the public.

And someone came to my hearing and said, I feel concerned that this is a residential neighborhood, and they weren’t any of my neighbors that I, that are even on a street someone would drive down. But you know, it’s a fair concern. We live in residential neighborhoods and don’t want big, what feels like big business in our neighborhoods.

And so, you know, we heard his concerns and I I talked to him about how I do drop off and pick up to keep the cars moving. And the city has a set list of [00:35:00] requirements and the city explained, you know, this business meets all of our requirements to have this permit. And so then I was granted that permit.

And I renew it annually. I don’t have to pay the whole, it was, it was over a thousand dollars the first time through. And, and it was a process. So you wanna make sure, first of all, that you understand what your city’s codes and rules are. , and I can have up to 12 students. So I just, would say, start there and then for me, it would be too expensive if I tried to make my outdoor preschool, look, with like, have all of the highest end materials.

So you have to watch garage sales and thrift stores, I think to find your materials and be willing to let it be a little messy. And you know, parents will donate things over time and whatever, but you know, really the classroom is another teacher. And you think about your classroom not as just where you do your work, but as a teacher.

And so you’re, you want to have materials. That are open-ended, that are [00:36:00] developmentally appropriate and that, loose parts, for example, are so awesome because your loose parts can be part of your fairy garden. They can become dinosaurs. They can be toppings on pizza, and it’s the same set of little wooden, colorful, loose parts, for example.

With their imagination, and you don’t even know what they’re gonna come up with one time, the buds off of my magnolia trees were dropping and they look cool, they’re furry and they feel like a little mouse. And they spent two weeks creating, a mouse kind of world, right? And so the materials don’t have to be expensive.

So that’s the other thing I would say is don’t overspend on what you think you need to have. You can watch Facebook marketplace and get chairs and tables and, and things like that. And then the other thing I would say is spend some time reading the literature around how outdoor spaces support learning, and make sure that you actually, I mean, it looks cool and sounds cool, but what’s really cool is the learning.

Right? And so if that’s what’s driving the decisions you make around how you set that [00:37:00] up, I, I don’t think you can really go wrong. And then it’s a lot of communication around expectations with your students and your parents. We only have one role at preschool and it’s follow direction. That’s, that’s it.

Everyone knows the rule. It’s follow directions, so then we can give them all sorts of directions and they just understand that the rule is follow directions, but you know, you have to decide how you’re gonna communicate all of that. Because we have places out here where someone could get hurt. You’ve seen them.

There are high places and I don’t like my teachers to say things like, be careful. So I wanna say, oh, stop. When I say freeze frame or stop, kids freeze. And then I’ll say, hold on, pay attention right now to your body. Do you feel safe? They’re like, you know, on the outside of the slide, you know, at the top, which is basically a story and a half high, you know, and I’m freaking out inside.

Do you feel safe right now? No. Do you have a plan for how you’re gonna get down from there? What’s a choice you could make right now with your body, including some words you [00:38:00] could say, I think I need your help. Like pay attention to, right. So they learn. We have a lot of hands on at the start of the year around assessing risk.

And that, I think is a really valuable thing for a preschooler to learn. Am I safe on this swing? If I stand on this swing and my buddy stands on this swing and we let go, do you feel safe right now? What are some things that could happen? You know, so all of that, you just need to have the theory in your heart and mind before you start, I think, to really support what you’re doing.

Denise: The curriculum. Does the curriculum change when you’re an outdoor preschool versus an indoor preschool? 

Lisa Boyce: Yes, I think it does. We have a 20 foot by 10 foot awning that we’re currently sitting under this tent space, which does give us some cover.

But some of the things we like to do, we’ve had to change how we do ’em just because if it’s raining, it’s gonna, you can’t have your books out in the rain, for example. So you’re gonna think differently about what you’re doing. [00:39:00] And I would say you always need a covered space for some of the work you’re doing outside.

We have, I have a two year curriculum and it took me a few years to really get that set, but it’s always open to change, but it’s just a general list of kind of units that we do. But a lot of times what I’m learning is that if I can suspend my curriculum and really trust play and I know what my goals are, especially for my speech kids, we do better.

When I’m really following the child’s lead, we learn so much more than when I have over structured and over planned like, I’ll call it structured play, but it’s really still adult led. I’m telling them what to do in that center versus my younger class. This last year I just got rid of all centers and that was so scary for me cuz I like my structure and I do have a balance between what I call freeplay and structured play.

and I had gone to a couple different, continuing ed experiences around play and I know that the real, [00:40:00] advocates of play, like there’s no structured play, right. It’s. It’s just play. You have materials and spaces and, and that just felt so terrifying to me for three hours. 

Denise: Well, especially if you have speech and language goals.

Lisa Boyce: Yes, yes. But then with my littles, what I did was I switched from centers to play invitations. And so I will put a lot of thought into what my teachers now understand is an invitation to play. And that’s a set of materials like for example, the Taco playdough with taco toppings and then just a bunch of open-ended materials. And that’s just out there, they didn’t have to rotate to the playdough table, or we had shaving cream. I had built kind of clouds and a lake and some rocks in my sensory table. And there were dinosaurs cuz dinosaurs, love tacos was kind of the narrative, the foundation for our day. and then that was a polite invitation. [00:41:00] And I had frozen some dinosaurs in bowls and shapes, containers of icebergs and floated those in another bucket nearby. And I didn’t have a plan for it and I didn’t rotate kids through it. And they spent over an hour, a whole bunch of ’em, different ages in there. And I just bombarded them with what I knew the goals were for the kids that were in that space, that were my speech and language kids.

So it’s kind of a balance. But for the younger kids, I have found. Really surrendering my structure and my curriculum a bit has helped. I do like to have units, so we do this year, we’ll, do you know me, myself, and I, and then community and then the farm and , that’s a project-based learning thing. We start with books on farms and post-it notes, and they do quote unquote research and they scribble and they tell me our firm needs cows and I’ll write cows for them.

Or in the older class, we’ll write like, Turtle, T R T L, you know, art, we did the ocean, but we’ll do the farm. And so then we start thinking of, well, how can we make [00:42:00] hay? What does hay look like? And so we’ll cut out yellow paper and glue it to cereal boxes and make bales of hay and all. That’s a whole immersion thing, right?

And so we do that in the fall, and then we go through holidays and we always do fairy tales and nursery rhymes in the winter. And then they put on a show and they make the tickets and the treats and they create the setting and the props and the costumes and we do narratives cuz we’re working hard on story grammar every year.

And so by then they really got it down and they understand. And so we usually will do, like this year they did the three Little pigs and Goldilocks and the Three Bears and, they, it’s just an easy script that repeats itself. Everyone is, every part, you never get a part assigned. Even the day of the show with this year we had over 50 grandparents and parents outside.

 We draw a name and that’s your part in the show and you know all the parts and you know the narrative. And you know, there’s gotta be characters in a setting and you’ve gotta, the narrator has to [00:43:00] tell the audience about that and we go from there to authors and artists. Every year we do fairytales and authors and artists.

We just switch out the authors and the artists, every other year we rotate between the rainforest and the ocean. And that’s our year.

Denise: This has been a fantastic interview. I want to come to this preschool.

Lisa Boyce: It’s so much fun.

Denise: Just to play. 

Lisa Boyce: Yeah, I like to go to preschool every day. I learn new things all the time.

Denise: What a fantastic interview. I’m so grateful to Lisa for taking the time to describe her methods and discoveries in running an outdoor preschool. It’s given me a lot to think about, but I can come up with four main takeaways right now. Number one outdoor spaces, support executive function and emotional regulation. 

 To don’t be afraid to surrender your structure in favor of free play. Three preschool is a critical time to address phonological awareness, which you can accomplish in so many ways. And for. Your materials don’t need to be complex or expensive. There’s a lot of value in loose parts. Stan Plato, as I always [00:44:00] say, simple tools create optimal outcomes. 

 Thank you for joining me under the speech umbrella today. I hope you learned something to help you in your therapy. If you did, please share this podcast with a fellow speech therapist and leave a five star review on apple, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your subscriptions. While you’re online. Come on over to the speech umbrella.com where you will find transcripts links and my free resource library. 

 I also have some other valuable courses and therapy aids in my store. That’s all@thespeechumbrella.com. Let’s connect on social media. I’m D Stratton SLP on Instagram and the speech umbrella on Facebook and YouTube. You can also find me on TPT. I hope to talk to you soon. 

Bye. For now.