We teach everyone how to play because play is the essence of learning.
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About Nestingplay
Nestingplay is a social enterprise, providing practical training for kindergarten and pre-school teachers. The aim of our training is to enable teachers to involve vulnerable children in playing, working together or other daily activities. We also design inclusive playground equipment where kids with different abilities can play together on the same equipment. Our equipment can accommodate children with a wide range of motor skills, with mental and physical challenges, including children on the autism spectrum. Finally, we make it a priority to work closely with parents and communities to create more inclusive learning environment.
A short presentation on NestingPlay can be downloaded: Nestingplay_presentation.
Mission
Nestingplay is recognized for the successful inclusion of 0-10 years old children with different challenges or disabilities, due to developmental delays or psychological issues, such as trauma suffered because of poverty, war, persecution or exclusion. Our holistic concept is designed by experts and practitioners. It includes (i) training for kindergarten, pre-school/primary school teachers and other education professionals, (ii) learning opportunities for parents, and (iii) inclusive playground equipment. We believe in the power of play as the essence of learning.
Vision
Young children play together regardless of their individual abilities and social background. Educational institutions, parents, municipalities and external partners build strong communities that support vulnerable children to improve their learning and social inclusion.
Our team
Eszter Harsányi
C.E.O. Owner
Responsible for business development and sales, I am a former HR expert and mother of two children. After the birth of my second son, Aaron, I realized how big of a task it is to raise and educate a disabled child and create the right environment to integrate them into the community and with their peers. At the age of six months, Aaron was diagnosed with severe epilepsy and, after years of suffering Aaron is now playing together and studying with his first-class companions. Together with my colleagues, I have launched a system of special playground equipment, which offers a solution to the limited inclusion of children with special needs into the community. Within the framework of Nestingplay, I’m responsible for the development of the business concept and training programs, and the transfer of knowledge with an inspiring and dedicated team!
Award-winning Entrepeneur: Ashoka Fellow and Exceptional Women of Excellence!
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Rita Szőke
I have been teaching children with diverse behaviours for 25 years as a language and communication developer. The main focus of my work is children with attention deficit and behavioural problems. Throughout my career, I have often worked directly with kindergartens. I have given advice to kindergarten teachers on how to involve kids with behavioural problems in kindergarten communities. I have often found that if non-disabled and disabled children play together there are long-lasting, positive effects on both sides. I believe in playing together. Benefits of this include lasting friendships, broader social skills and personal principles, increased comfort levels with people who have special needs (and vice versa), and caring, nurturing kindergarten environments. The most important function of friendship is to make people feel cared for, loved, and safe. Children with disabilities can create long-lasting friendships that would not be possible otherwise, and these friendships can give them the skills to navigate social relationships later on in life.
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Éva Szomor
I worked as a language and speech therapist in Israel between 1989 and 2000. In this period, I was engaged in early intervention. Since 2000 I have been involved in the Hungarian nursery and health visitor system as language and communication developer. I also work on new professional directions of this area. I hold training about general development of children and communication with parents for nursery teachers and early childhood educators every month.
Between 2006-2011 I took part in the Sure Start Program as an early childhood professional.
In 2001 I founded my private consultation for children under the age of 4 years with communication developmental disorders and for their families. I handed over my consultation to Kincs-Ő Foundation in 2006, where I am working as a consultant ever since.
Since 2009 I have been a member of European Nursing Students Association (ENSA). I have been also a member of Berlin Brandenburg International School (BBIS) since 2014, where I’m working on development of special programs as an early childhood expert.
I was working in Mozambique, Israel, Berlin, everywhere as an early childhood professional.
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Our services
NestingPlay Foundations
Our NestingPlay Foundations training offers the basics about our approach. It explains what we noticed during the past 30 years of working in early childhood and primary education programs, that the number of children who seems ‘different’ and often get excluded and isolated with many times extreme behavior patterns is growing steadily. This is due to the intensified pace of living of our times, the elevated stress level families experience, the growing global inequality and poverty affecting higher number of people, natural disasters, migration, wars, pandemics, and other illnesses. More children are born with organic disabilities and neurological issues, usually demonstrated via extreme behaviors or unusual social interactions. People are less and less tolerant and welcoming towards diversity.
Unfortunately, teachers are not equipped and taught to deal with children with diverse development paths and behaviors, and special education teachers are often absent from the classrooms. It is, therefore, the teachers’ task to include these children in the daily activities. NestingPlay’s mandate is to make teachers’ and parents’ lives easier. With our guidance, children can receive the needed development unnoticed through joyful play activities. We provide special sensory-based development play activities that educators and parents could use daily, built into their curriculum and usual routine with the objective to help include these diverse children in joyful play activities. Playing together also builds more tolerance and acceptance among children.
Description:
● Training for child-care professionals, teachers, or parents on working with children with developmental delays or behavior challenges, caused by organic disabilities, neurological disorders, injuries, severe illness or elevated and prolonged stress because of poverty, war, exclusion, trauma, etc. How to deal with a child who destroys classroom work or who is annoying?
● Training about the benefits of free play to children’s social, emotional, creative, and cognitive development, particularly for the most marginalized.
NestingPlay Weekly Play activities
The NestingPlay Weekly Play activities include specially designed weekly skill development activities which are simple, joyful, and adaptable. We undertake a school preparedness assessment in four key skill areas with the kindergarten children, including visuo-motoric and graphomotor skills, vocabulary, and storytelling. Based on the results, we put together a tailor-made set of play activities, designed to improve the skill (cognitive, motoric, fine motoric, social, and emotional, etc.) deficiencies that we encountered through the assessments. At the beginning of each week, we discuss the use of these special play activities with the teachers and at the end of the week, we hear from them about the progress children showed during the week or the challenges they encountered. These two weekly consultations enable teachers to understand how the play activities impact children, monitor their progress, and receive supervision from the NestingPlay team. Based on these consultations, we develop the next week’s set of play activities. Our program closes with another skill assessment to document children’s progress and evaluate outcomes.
The play activities are structured based on skills to be developed, theme, age, and level of difficulty. The activities can be built into the existing curriculum and do not require additional effort from the teachers. The knowledge and the play activities will remain with the kindergartens, freely used in their work of the upcoming years. We aim to make teachers’ lives more predictable, structured, and simple for the ultimate benefit of the most vulnerable children.
Description:
● School preparedness assessments for children (visuo-motoric and graphomotor skills, vocabulary, and storytelling) at the start and end of the program
● Development of weekly sensory play activities for teachers: tailor-made to the children groups’ needs, joyful, experiential, and adaptable
● Supervision/consultations (2x/week)
Parents Academy: Building Conscious Parents
Given that parents spend the most time with their children, they know them the best and thus, can provide the best nurturing environment for their development. Our work with parents aims to build their consciousness and knowledge about the reasons behind their children’s given behavior or developmental delay. Our Foundations training explains to them the benefits of free play for their child’s cognitive, motoric, social, and emotional development. It also discusses the different sequences of brain development, the importance of responsive relations to rewire the brain and suggests alternatives for playing together at home as a family. The Weekly Play activities increase the awareness of parents about the alternative play activities that can develop different skill deficiencies or developmental delays.
We also aim to sensitize majority parents about issues with children with disabilities, behavior challenges and special needs. We discuss modalities for more efficiently communicating and cooperating with other parents for the benefit of their child (with special needs)? Finally, we make available our online game for parents to learn navigate through different unusual behaviors patterns in a joyful and interactive way. Our vision is to help generate conscious, understanding, and cooperative parent communities around the children who need them the most.
Description:
NestingPlay Foundations: training on child development phases, brain development sequences, benefits of free play. How to play at home as a family? How to play with a child with special needs? – with simple, practical, and low-cost play activity suggestions for every day
NestingPlay Weekly Play activities to teach parents play activities that develop different skill deficiencies or developmental delays.
Mediating between parents (with special needs and neurotypical ones)
Sensitizing about issues with children with disabilities, behavior challenges and special needs
Communicating about different development disorders
Facilitating communications within the family, especially about issues affecting siblings and the role of grandparents
Communicating and cooperating with parents for the benefit of the children with special needs
Online game for parents: addressing everyday behavior challenges and situations for children with special needs (freely downloadable)
Online game for pre-schools and parents
The NestingPlay team has developed an online game for pre-school teachers and parents to navigate through different unusual behaviors children may demonstrate. The players have to find the most adequate response to a given behavior issue, such as a child always destroying others’ sand castles, or trying to connect through provoking peers, or always doing the opposite that has been requested from her, etc. The game offers various options with explanation for each alternative. The game provides a joyful vehicle for understanding unusual behaviors and learning alternative ways to rewire the brain for more adequate social interactions. The game is available online and freely downloadable for any user.
Inclusive school development
Working with schools, it has become clear that many children who navigate through kindergarten end up demonstrating behavior and/or learning difficulties in school. These children remained unnoticed during the early years but reveal development delays or behavior issues when entering primary school. For such reason, we offer our NestingPlay Foundations training for primary schools also to learn recognize children with diverse development paths and behaviors, caused by organic disabilities, neurological disorders, injuries, severe illness or elevated and prolonged stress because of poverty, war, exclusion, trauma, etc. Teachers will also learn about the benefits of free play to promote children’s social, emotional, creative, and cognitive development, and learn alternative practices to include everyone in free play, particularly the most marginalized.
Our package also includes advising on designing the admission criteria and process of selection, for the benefit of students with special needs. We often encountered that the school’s inclusion policy does not reflect its human, financial, and technical capacities which causes problems when admitted students with special needs cannot receive the support services needed. Many conflicts could be avoided with conscious planning from the perspective of inclusion.
In addition, we provide training and counselling on working with children with learning disabilities, communicating about different development disorders, developing effective learning strategies for students, and efficient classroom management creating inclusive student communities. Finally, we provide advice on creating inclusive play areas outdoor and indoor, reviewing aspects of safety, accessibility, and physical infrastructure. In summary, we provide guidance on how to establish a (new) inclusive primary school or make inclusion happen? All our trainings provide practical and simple alternatives for helping children with special needs tap into the benefits of free play.
Description:
NestingPlay Foundations: training for teachers on working with children with developmental delays or behavior challenges, caused by organic disabilities, neurological disorders, injuries, severe illness or elevated and prolonged stress because of poverty, war, exclusion, trauma, etc. How to deal with a child who destroys classroom work, who is annoying?
Training on the benefits of free play to children’s social, emotional, creative, and cognitive development, particularly for the most marginalized.
Advising on designing the admission criteria and process of selection of students with special needs best reflecting the given resources of the receiving school
Counselling educators on working with children with learning disabilities
Counselling educators on developing effective learning strategies for students
Counselling educators on communicating about different development disorders
Counselling educators on classroom management creating inclusive student communities
Weekly consultations providing guidance and interaction with educators (team supervision and case management)
Advising on setting up outdoor inclusive play areas with special sensory installations
Advising on creating indoor inclusive sensory play areas with special sensory installations
Advising on establishing a new inclusive primary school: How to make inclusion happen? Aspects of accessibility, physical infrastructure, inclusive classroom management, admission concepts, etc.
Inclusive play areas: outdoor and indoor
During the past decade, we noticed that even though the use of special sensory equipment has become more popular in early childhood and primary education, their use was often limited to indoor settings. When children got outside, the outdoor play areas which in most countries offer a standard selection of equipment, did not invite children to play together or to develop skills. We also met many children who could not adjust to the outdoor open space, seemed lost in finding constructive play methods or adequate bonding with peers.
Given that we have found no such outdoor equipment available on the market, we designed a special set of outdoor sensory installations which enables all kinds of children to play together. This equipment provides various alternatives for play and bonding, while they also develop children’s motoric, creative, social and emotional skills. NestingPlay now has a catalogue of special sensory play equipment for both outdoor and indoor use, which are safe, easy to compile and encourage social interactions. Kindergartens, schools, or municipalities can choose from the catalogue and receive customized advice on what specific equipment would be best to use for them and why? This way, outdoor settings can also become catalyzers for practicing bonding and playing together, and thus, acquiring important social and emotional skills for all children.
Description:
Inclusive outdoor sensory playground equipment: specially designed outdoor play installations promoting inclusive and joyful play
Advising on setting up indoor inclusive play areas with special sensory installations (musical, tactical and arts equipment)
Supportive communities around children with special needs
NestingPlay’s ultimate vision is to help create informed and supportive micro-communities around children with special needs. We believe that teacher/adult-led and student-centered learning teams with education and health professionals, parents, and the local community included, can maximize children’s learning, inclusion, and welfare. Building alliances with segments of the society around the most vulnerable children can generate sustainable results. We build nests where children can play and bond in safe, supportive, and inspiring environments sustained by the different actors of the community.
Playgrounds or community centers are common meeting places, attracting children, parents, grandparents, professionals, and other members of the community. Learning together about the diversity of the children’s community, their special needs, and alternatives for encouraging their learning, welfare, and social inclusion we consider as a priority for any long-lasting change to happen.
Therefore, we offer all of our existing services to help build informed and supportive local communities, including training on the benefits of free play, the development of a child, working with children with behavior issues or developmental delays, applying weekly sensory-based development play activities, educating and sensitizing parents, communicating efficiently for the benefit of children with special needs, and setting up inclusive outdoor and indoor play areas for the benefit of all children.
Description:
NestingPlay Foundations: training on child development phases, brain development sequences, benefits of free play. How to play at home as a family? How to play with a child with special needs? – with simple, practical, and low-cost play activity suggestions
Communicating about different development disorders
Communicating and cooperating with parents for the benefit of children with special needs
Mediating between parents (with special needs and neurotypical ones)
Sensitizing about issues with children with disabilities, behavior challenges and special needs
Facilitating communications about issues affecting siblings and the role of grandparents
Promoting communications and cooperation among generations
Advising on developing inclusive play areas outdoor and indoor
Building alliances with teachers and parents around children with special needs (sensitizing, mediating, awareness raising)
Strengthening communities for the benefit of all children
What people say about Nestingplay?
Testimonials
I really liked that we worked in
a small group during the training. I think the exchange of practical experience helps everyone. The cases of board games capture well what we have experienced in everyday life. Everybody has many similar situations what we had already experienced and during the training we had the opportunity to share the knowledge with each other.
My keywords about the training: awareness, competence.
Any book can be read, but it is different when we have the opportunity to be and think together on a difficult situation. This form of training helps us to pay even more attention to children – I take it with me from the training that our task in problematic situations is not firefighting, but finding a consistent long-term solution.
For us, behavioral disorders and aggression are more likely to cause conflict in the group. It is great that I have received exact practical answers to my questions. Besides the most helpful to me was that we were able to talk honestly about how to communicate with parents. I got some really good tips, I can’t wait to try them out in practice!
I really liked the game. It was good not to find an immediate solution to the situation, but to think through it as an outside observer. I will use this into my everyday work.
Our partners
Bezerédj Amália Óvoda és Bölcsőde Fertőszentmiklós
Nyíregyháza Megyei Jogú Város Polgármesteri Hivatala
Budapest Főváros III. Kerület Óbuda-Békásmegyer Önkormányzat
Get in touch
Location
Ideathon Kft 1136 Hollán Ernő 16 Budapest, Hungary
Contact Us
Phone : +36304354347Email : info@nestingplay.com
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Inclusive school development
Working with schools, it has become clear that many children who navigate through kindergarten end up demonstrating behavior and/or learning difficulties in school. These children remained unnoticed during the early years but reveal development delays or behavior issues when entering primary school. For such reason, we offer our NestingPlay Foundations training for primary schools also to learn recognize children with diverse development paths and behaviors, caused by organic disabilities, neurological disorders, injuries, severe illness or elevated and prolonged stress because of poverty, war, exclusion, trauma, etc. Teachers will also learn about the benefits of free play to promote children’s social, emotional, creative, and cognitive development, and learn alternative practices to include everyone in free play, particularly the most marginalized.
Our package also includes advising on designing the admission criteria and process of selection, for the benefit of students with special needs. We often encountered that the school’s inclusion policy does not reflect its human, financial, and technical capacities which causes problems when admitted students with special needs cannot receive the support services needed. Many conflicts could be avoided with conscious planning from the perspective of inclusion.
In addition, we provide training and counselling on working with children with learning disabilities, communicating about different development disorders, developing effective learning strategies for students, and efficient classroom management creating inclusive student communities. Finally, we provide advice on creating inclusive play areas outdoor and indoor, reviewing aspects of safety, accessibility, and physical infrastructure. In summary, we provide guidance on how to establish a (new) inclusive primary school or make inclusion happen? All our trainings provide practical and simple alternatives for helping children with special needs tap into the benefits of free play.
Description:
What people say about Nestingplay?
