Serious about
not being serious.
Play is not what children do instead of learning. It is how children learn. We build our days around that truth, and the research backs it up.
Freely chosen🎈 Seriously funThree things make it play
Borrowed from the play sector, and true in every one of our clubs. Tap each one.
The child decides. Not the schedule, not the educator, not the worksheet. When a child chooses the play, they own the learning that comes with it. Our educators set the table, then step back.
The child steers. The rules can change halfway through. The fort can become a spaceship. That flexibility is where problem solving, negotiation, and creativity actually live.
The child plays for the joy of it. No sticker, no prize, no grade. Motivation that comes from inside is the kind that builds persistence, and it is the kind that lasts.
What it looks like, what it really is
Every one of these is happening in a TOPP KIDS club this afternoon. Watch what is underneath.
Fort engineering01Building a fort
Two kids, six chairs, one quilt. Watch them argue about load bearing walls without ever using the words.
Engineering, spatial reasoning, negotiating a shared plan, and resilience when it collapses for the third time.
Chase and dodge02A game of tag
The rules change three times before anyone is caught, and every change is negotiated at a full sprint.
Cardiovascular health, agility, reading social cues at speed, self regulation, and fair play under pressure.
The whole cast03Playing pretend
Costumes, crowns, and a plot that makes sense only to the six people performing it. That is the point.
Perspective taking, vocabulary, sequencing a story, and rehearsing feelings that are big and new.
A hundred possibilities04Playing with loose parts
Bricks, bottle caps, buttons, and corks. Open ended pieces with no instructions, which is exactly why they get used a hundred different ways.
Early math, classification, patterning, invention, and the deep focus that carries straight into a classroom.
The great debate05Arguing over rules
The most valuable ten minutes of the afternoon usually sound like the least productive ten minutes.
Conflict resolution, empathy, compromise, and learning that a friendship survives disagreement.
Beautifully bored06Doing nothing at all
Boredom is not a gap in the programming. It is where the next idea comes from.
Rest, daydreaming, and the mental space where creativity and self knowledge quietly grow.
Where TOPP KIDS sits
Not every minute is free play, and not every minute is structured. Slide it and see what changes.
Mostly child led
This is where we live. Children choose their clubs, invent the games, and drive the projects. Educators are close by, coaching and noticing, not directing.
How play is built into every single day
Our programming rests on seven TOPP KIDS Pillars. Every club, every location, every afternoon.
TOPP KIDS Pillar 1 of 7
Creative Expression
Art, music, drama, and making a mess with purpose. Children express what they cannot always say out loud, and discover they have something worth expressing.
TOPP KIDS Pillar 2 of 7
Physical Literacy
Running, climbing, throwing, balancing, and the confidence to try. Physical literacy is the foundation for a lifetime of active living, and it is built through play, not drills.
TOPP KIDS Pillar 3 of 7
STREAM
Science, technology, reading, engineering, arts, and math, tangled together the way real problems are. Loose parts, tinkering, and questions with more than one right answer.
TOPP KIDS Pillar 4 of 7
Self Directed Play
The child chooses, the child leads, and the educator protects the space for it. Uninterrupted stretches where kiddos follow their own idea all the way through are where independence and identity are built.
TOPP KIDS Pillar 5 of 7
Literacy
Reading and math woven into the fun rather than bolted onto it. Story time, comics, recipes, scorekeeping, budgeting a club project, and games that are secretly number practice.
TOPP KIDS Pillar 6 of 7
Junior Leadership
Older kiddos coach younger ones, run their own clubs, and sit on our Youth Advisory Group. Leadership is a skill, and it is coachable.
TOPP KIDS Pillar 7 of 7
Clubs
Child chosen, child driven, and always changing. If a group of kids is passionate about it, there is a club for it, and they help build it.
Play is not a nice extra
The research on play and out of school time is clear, and it is not comfortable reading.
The same research is clear about what makes out of school time work: programs that are sequenced, active, focused, and explicit about the skills they are building. That is exactly how our five pillars are designed, and why our educators are trained the way they are.
What play is doing in there
Play is not a break from brain development. Play is brain development. Tap a region to see what the research says.
Prefrontal cortex
Neuroscientist Dr. Sergio Pellis at the University of Lethbridge has spent decades showing that juvenile play shapes the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that handles planning, impulse control, and flexible thinking. His work found that play experience literally changes the connections between neurons at the front of the brain.
Social brain
Free play with other children is cognitively demanding. Deciding what the game is, agreeing on rules, and repairing things when someone breaks them all build the circuits behind empathy and social judgement. Adult refereed activities do not stretch those circuits the same way.
Stress response
Play with a trusted adult nearby helps children practise going from excited to calm and back again. That is self regulation being built, one round of tag at a time, and it is what lets a child settle into homework afterwards.
Motor and sensory
Climbing, balancing, throwing, and spinning wire the brain to the body. Physical literacy in childhood predicts a lifetime of confident movement, and movement itself primes the brain for learning.
Memory and learning
Anything learned while a child is delighted, moving, and choosing tends to stay. Play attaches emotion to information, and emotion is what tells a growing brain that something is worth keeping. It is why the club project a child invented is remembered long after the worksheet is forgotten.
“The experience of play changes the connections of the neurons at the front end of your brain.”
This wiring happens most intensely during the juvenile years, the ages we serve. Play deprived animals in Pellis’ research grew into adults that were socially clumsy and cognitively rigid. Children get one run at this window, and it happens in the hours between the school bell and dinner.
Which is precisely the time your child is with us.
Sources include Dr. Sergio Pellis and the Canadian Centre for Behavioural Neuroscience at the University of Lethbridge, and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, whose work on executive function describes these skills as built through practice and supportive relationships rather than taught by instruction.
Can you spot the learning?
Four moments from a real afternoon. Pick what is actually happening.
Question 1 of 4
A child spends twenty minutes lining up every toy car by colour, then starts again.
Sorting and patterning are the roots of algebra. That repetition is a brain rehearsing a system.
Question 2 of 4
Two kids abandon a game halfway through to invent a completely new one with different rules.
Switching a shared framework mid play is high level executive function. Adults find this hard in meetings.
Question 3 of 4
A child asks to sit out and just watch the group for a while.
Watching is a legitimate stage of play. Children rehearse socially before they join, and pushing them in short circuits it.
Question 4 of 4
An older kiddo appoints themselves referee and starts settling arguments.
This is leadership in its raw form. Our Junior Leadership pillar exists to coach exactly this instinct.
You scored 0 of 4
Every one of these looks like fooling around. Every one of them is a brain under construction.
Risk is not the same as danger
Risky play gives a child a real thrill and a real choice, where they can see the challenge and decide how far to go. Here are the six kinds, and how each one shows up at TOPP KIDS.
Our job is not to remove the challenge. Our job is to remove the hazards a child cannot see, teach the skills, and then let them decide. That is a promise we made when we signed the Play Charter.
We signed something, and we meant it
In 2017, Calgary hosted the International Play Association world conference. Out of it came the Calgary Play Charter, signed by dozens of organizations who agreed that play belongs to every child in this city.
TOPP KIDS was the first child care organization to sign the Calgary Play Charter. We did not sign it because it was expected of us. We signed it because it said out loud what we had already built our programs around, and because someone in child care needed to go first.
ELCC & Community Development is a signatory too.
Play develops a core set of skills for healthy well being.
Play is a vital component of childhood. It is freely chosen, personally directed, and intrinsically motivated.
Play is fun, uncertain, challenging and flexible.
When children have opportunities to play they use creativity, innovation, and reflection to learn, experiment, solve problems, create new worlds, test boundaries, assess risk, and meet challenges.
Play is a natural state for a child.
Support play that encourages physical, emotional and social development.
Understand and communicate that risk is a valuable component to play, and encourage play that allows children to develop risk taking skills.
Create environments that children can control, providing flexibility in materials and spaces that promote inquiry and evoke curiosity.
Embrace the geography and climate of Calgary and support children to play outdoors all year round.
Educate and inform adults, using common language across all organizations, on the importance of play.
Involve children in the decisions that affect their lives.
Report on our organization’s experience with play.
See every signatory at calgary.ca.
Levels of community at TOPP KIDS
A child belongs to more than one circle, and we work in all of them. Tap a ring.
TOPP KIDS
Every child, family, and Family Member inside our clubs. This is where belonging starts, with kiddos who know each other by name and educators who know what kind of day they are having.
School
We are guests in someone else’s building, and we act like partners in it. Shared spaces, shared expectations, and a relationship with principals and staff that outlasts any one school year.
Neighbourhood
Parks, pathways, libraries, and local businesses. We work alongside community associations and neighbourhood organizations, sharing spaces, joining events, and building the kind of relationships that make a neighbourhood feel like one. Our kiddos get out into the community they live in, and the community gets to see what school age care actually looks like.
Municipality
Calgary, Okotoks, and the Foothills. This is where our kiddos learn that they are citizens, not just students. Children run their own fundraisers and drives through Junior Leadership, families rally behind local causes, and the TOPP KIDS Foundation extends that work by removing cost as a barrier to play. We signed the Calgary Play Charter alongside the City and dozens of other organizations, and we show up for the communities that host us.
TOPP KIDS
School
Neighbourhood
Municipality
Grounded in Flight
Alberta’s early learning and care framework, Flight, treats children as mighty learners and citizens, and puts play at the centre of practice. Our educators are trained in it, and our programming reflects its holistic goals: wellbeing, play and playfulness, communication and literacies, and diversity and social responsibility. It is also why our planning starts with watching children rather than filling a schedule.
Visit flightframework.ca What a normal Tuesday looks like at TOPP KIDS
Come play with us
Find your school, meet your educators, and see what a child led afternoon really looks like.
