Early Years Education Consulting
Where Purpose
Meets Play
Helping children become curious, confident, lifelong learners.
Research-informed consulting for schools, faith communities, and families who believe learning begins with connection.
Trusted by Schools, Educators & Families Worldwide
- International Schools
- Independent Schools
- Public Schools
- Professional Learning
- Families
- Faith Communities
One team, three doors
Three pathways, one cornerstone.
Most early years programs pick a lane: secular-developmental or faith-based, and treat whichever one they didn't pick as an accessory bolted on afterward, rather than a lens built in from the start.
Foundations, Formation, and Families share the same research base and design philosophy; the only thing that changes is the entry point.
Why Connection Matters
Learning doesn't begin with curriculum.
It begins with a felt sense of safety.
A child's brain isn't built to absorb information first and connect second. It's the reverse. Regulation happens alongside a trusted adult, not on command. When a child feels truly seen, the nervous system settles, and only then does real, durable learning become possible.
This isn't a philosophy layered on top of curriculum. It's the ground on which curriculum is built. Whether we're in a classroom, a congregation, or a living room, the work is the same: build the relationship first, and the learning follows.
How We Go About Our Work
Four principles, applied everywhere.
Spiritually-Integrated Consulting
Formation, for the whole child.
Alongside Foundations and Families, our Formation pathway positions spiritual formation and neuroscience as complementary forces regardless of religion or doctrine, built to serve any tradition, or an intentional pluralism that honors several at once.
Beauty as a Way of Knowing
A child falling still before something beautiful is not merely playing; she is encountering meaning.
Heart Awakening
Awareness, Coherence, Compassion. Three connected movements from noticing, to steadiness, to turning outward.
Sacred in the Everyday
Finding the divine in all things and learning to reach for the more generous, more life-giving choice.
Our Signature Practice
Sunrise / Sunset
One practice. Three pathways. Same threshold. Sunrise/Sunset is our signature practice. A short, embodied rhythm that opens and closes the day, adapted across every door we work through.
A few quiet breaths, then one question: “What are you hoping for today?” Children name a hope out loud, small or big, before the day's noise takes over.
Drag to preview the practice, or just keep scrolling
From the Studio
Learn, Cultivate, Gather.
Where Purpose Meets Practice
The Studio is where the work actually happens. Not a single workshop or a one-off consultation, but a rhythm with three parts.
Take it in. Put it into practice. Come together.
That's the whole model.
From the Substack
Writing on connection, in full.
Short essays and field notes from the work.
Never miss an essay
Get new writing from Little Learners Big Connections straight to your inbox.
How It Works
What happens after you reach out.
No fixed price list. Every engagement is scoped to what you actually need. Here's the shape of it.
A first conversation
Tell us about your school, community, or family. What's working, what isn't, and what you're hoping changes. No proposal, no pitch, just listening.
A scoped proposal
We come back with a clear plan: what we'd build, over what timeframe, and what it costs. Every engagement is priced individually, from a single workshop to a multi-year partnership.
Design & delivery
Curriculum, training, or practice implementation built alongside your team rather than handed to them, so it actually reflects your culture, not a template.
Ongoing partnership
Most relationships continue past the first delivery: observations, refinement, and the next phase, as your program grows.
Questions
Before you reach out.
No. Many of our partners move between them. A school might start with Foundations and later add Formation for its community; a family might use Families tools alongside a child's Foundations-based classroom. The research base is shared, so the doors work together.
Never a single one. Formation is built to serve any tradition, or an intentional pluralism that honors several at once using spirituality and neuroscience as complementary forces rather than competing ones.
No materials, no training manual to start. It's a short, embodied rhythm. A few minutes at the start and end of the day that we help you adapt to your classroom, community, or home.
It depends entirely on scope. A single workshop and a multi-year curriculum partnership are priced very differently. We don't publish a fixed price list because we don't want to scope your engagement before we've actually talked to you. The first conversation is free, and you'll have a clear proposal with pricing before you commit to anything.
It depends on the pathway and the scope. A single workshop can happen in weeks, while full curriculum design or ongoing consulting is typically structured across a term or school year. We'll scope this together in your first conversation.
What struck me wasn't the curriculum binder — it was that our staff, our families, and our own values all ended up speaking the same language by the end of the first term.
Early Learning Director — Independent school partner
Drag, or use arrow keys, to browse
Why We Exist
Every child deserves an adult who is fully there.
I've spent two decades on multiple continents as a teacher, coach, mentor, and director; watching, from every seat, which programs actually reached young learners and which ones just looked good on paper. I've watched it play out in classrooms at home and abroad, in congregations that didn't share my language, and in my own living room with my son. The programs that actually changed children's lives were never the ones with the most materials or the biggest budgets. They were the ones where an adult had learned to be genuinely present.
I didn't arrive at this belief through a syllabus. I arrived at it slowly, watching faith and childhood development sit closer together than most curricula are willing to admit; that a child's sense of self, their dignity, isn't something we build through acquisition or achievement. It's something we recognize, and then protect.
Little Learners Big Connections exists to make that presence teachable. To turn a felt sense of connection into a design discipline that schools, communities, and families can actually build on, term after term, year after year.
This isn't a philosophy layered on top of what we do. It's the whole reason we do it.
— Renée
Founder and Principal Consultant, Little Learners Big Connections · Meet the team