About

Playful Learning is a homegrown website that was created to share useful and interesting information with families regarding the growth and development of their children.

My name is Mariah Bruehl and after working in the field of education for over a decade, I have been blessed with the opportunity to stay at home with my 4 and 6 year old daughters. I have an MS in Elementary Education, was a classroom teacher for 4 years and worked in Early Childhood and Elementary Administration for 6 years. Whether I was teaching in the classroom, training teachers or implementing programs across many grade levels, my true love was the development and implementation of curriculum.  Now that I am at home, I am beginning the journey of adapting what I know about educational research and practice into simple, playful learning experiences that parents can easily share with their children. 

I love to pull from a variety of philosophies, frameworks and research within the field of education.  Some of my deepest influences are: the Reggio Emilia Approach, Teaching for Understanding, Constructivism, Place-Based Education, The Reading and Writing Project, Maria Montessori, and Howard Gardner.

As a mother and an educator I have had brilliant moments as well as humbling ones. Many of the activities you will find on this website failed miserably the first time I attempted to share them with the girls.  Engaging in playful learning experiences with your children requires planning, preparation, flexibility, spontaneity and free, unstructured periods of time in your schedule.  This website has been designed to help families with the first two requirements: planning and preparation.  Incorporating the last three items: flexibility, spontaneity and free, unstructured periods of time into our lives is a process that is worthy of sharing with each other. I hope this site will be a forum for multiple perspectives. Often times in parenting and education there is no one “right” way to approach many of the issues we confront daily.

Our wish for this website is to create a community of families who document and share their playful learning experiences so that we can learn from and collaborate with people around the world.