EYEPlay - Childsplay

Early Years Educators at Play

EYEPlay is Childsplay’s drama-based professional development program designed specifically for early childhood educators. Over 18 months, teachers work one-on-one with professional teaching artists to integrate drama into literacy instruction, boosting comprehension, language skills, and classroom engagement. Backed by evidence and supported by the Helios Education Foundation, EYEPlay equips educators with lasting strategies to bring learning to life.

Why Choose EYEPlay?

Strengthens early literacy through drama integration
Provides personalized, one-on-one coaching
Builds teacher confidence with scaffolded training
Proven impact on comprehension, language, and student engagement

Program Overview

Childsplay’s EYEPlay Program (Early Years Educators at Play) is a creative drama-based, job-embedded professional development program for early childhood educators. Participants work one-on-one with professional teaching artists to strengthen literacy learning in their classroom through drama integration. With funding from the Helios Education Foundation, EYEPlay is adapted from Drama Frames, Childsplay’s successful, evidence-based model of training elementary classroom teachers to integrate drama into teaching curricular content.

Program Structure

EYEPlay is an 18 month program of scaffolded learning units, each of which follows an “I do, we do, you do” approach in which an educator progressively experiences and masters material. Childsplay’s model combines foundational skills training with role-modeling and one-on-one structured feedback, providing participants with the tools and confidence to design and implement drama-based lesson plans after the program’s completion. The one-on-one nature of this training program ensures that the specific goals and learnings can be targeted to fit each individual practitioner and classroom. By scaffolding learning over a multi-year period, Childsplay programs provide teachers with tangible, useful resources that can effectively expand their toolbox of teaching strategies.

Budget

All of Childsplay’s programs and budgets are customized for school’s individual needs and goals. The cost of the program starts at $3,000 per classroom, which includes over 50 hours of PD per teacher. Childsplay works with schools and districts to assist in obtaining grants to help support collaborations.

What Teachers Say

"The children are acting it out, taking ownership and dissecting the book, using all of their senses. I see it carried out in their play during the rest of the day. Comprehension is really, really high and the parents are sharing that. The kids are going home and talking about it. The parents will be in the classroom and look at the books and say, 'ohhh, that is the story that they were talking about.'"

"One of our goals with ELL children to increase their expressive language skills-how much vocabulary they use-how much they can talk to us. All of a sudden we get all of these answers from these kids. Kids who usually don’t talk were all involved!"

"We have a boy who is developmentally slower than the rest and we can see he is making connections through the pantomime and through using expressive language-so we know that he is really getting it through his receptive and expressive language-he is not just regurgitating-he is also coming up with his own ideas."

Interested in Professional Development?

Connect with our Education Outreach team to explore customized workshops for your school or district. Share your goals, and we’ll help design a program that brings learning to life.