The Invisible Backpack

 Every child who walks through the door is carrying something. Every adult in the room is too. The Invisible Backpack helps parents and educators understand what is really happening beneath challenging behaviour. Drawing on neuroscience, attachment theory, and self regulation, it shows you why the most powerful thing you have is not a technique but how you are within yourself. There is no such thing as a bad kid. There is always a story in the backpack.

Conflict is not the enemy - it's the teacher

This is an interactive, choose your own path story for early childhood educators. You step into a real conflict between two children and choose how to respond, then watch that choice ripple forward six months and ten years later. Five different paths, five different outcomes. Along the way you'll meet the nervous system science behind each response, and a reflection journal that saves your own answers as you go. This isn't a lecture. It's something you actually do.

Safe Enough to Connect

Safe Enough to Connect explores how our earliest attachment patterns shape the way we relate at work today. Through the lens of the nervous system, the Reticular Activating System, and the four attachment styles, we uncover the quiet "I'm not enough" wound beneath so much workplace reactivity. Grounding exercises and gentle reflection help us notice our own patterns with curiosity rather than judgment, so safety, awareness, and genuine connection can grow.

Donna Rego's testimonial about me 

Donna is the creator of Interplay and has been my mentor and supervisor of my work for the last 2 years

The body know the way

 This course is for those interested in recognising the signals within the body. It's the first stage in my InsideOUT mentoring pathway, run as a half-day group course.

Using the Inner Nature cards, I'll guide you through recognising what these signals are telling us about our nervous system, how we complete stress cycles, and why recognising emotion is the first step to getting stress under control.

This happened to us: It's not who we are 

 This course is for those interested in recognising the signals within the body. It's the first stage in my InsideOUT mentoring pathway, run as a half-day group course.

Using the Inner Nature cards, I'll guide you through recognising what these signals are telling us about our nervous system, how we complete stress cycles, and why recognising emotion is the first step to getting stress under control.

The 5 Kete 

 The Kete show us how to work with the stress hidden in plain sight.  This is a reflective day where we connect together looking at where you are now; whether for yourself or the children you are supporting.

Why Now is the stress Hidden in Plain Sight.

This course has a video course to watch before our day together.

WORKSHOP ONE The Relationship is the Practice

 What children need from the adults who care for them and how to offer it Children do not need every adult to be their primary attachment figure. But they do need every adult to be present, regulated and respectful in the moments they share. Drawing on the work of Emmi Pikler, this workshop looks honestly at what quality of relationship is actually possible in a group care setting and what it asks of the adults who show up every day. Not a replacement for home. Something real and meaningful in its own right. 90 minutes 

WORKSHOP TWO The Developing Child 

 Understanding brain biology and attachment from birth to school age A four month old and a four year old are not the same child. Their brains are different, their attachment needs are different, and what co-regulation looks like for each of them is completely different. This workshop gives teachers a clear developmental map from infancy through to school age, what is happening in the brain and body at each stage, what children need from adults at each stage, and how to meet children where they actually are rather than where we wish they were.

 WORKSHOP THREE

What You Carry, They Feel

 Because your stress doesn't stay with you

Teachers do not leave themselves at the door. This workshop explores how our own early experiences of being cared for shape the adults we become and how unmet needs and attachment wounds show up in our work without us realising it. Drawing on Emmi Pikler and attachment theory, we look at where these patterns come from, how they live in the nervous system, and what becomes possible when we begin to understand them. Includes a guided experiential that puts teachers inside the felt experience of both the child and the adult simultaneously.

WORKSHOP FOUR

When the Room Gets Hard 

 What happens inside you under pressure and what to do about it 

When a child is dysregulated and nothing is working, what happens in your body? This workshop gives teachers honest, practical language for their own nervous system responses under pressure including activation, deactivation, co-regulation and repair, without shame and without performance. Includes a small group experiential and reflective questions mapped to the 2026 Nga Paerewa | Standards for use as PGC evidence

 WORKSHOP FIVE 

Use Your Words?

 Helping children regulate, relate and reason without putting them under pressure

That phrase contains an assumption. That children can. This workshop unpacks what children are actually capable of neurologically at different stages of development and what we are really asking of them when we expect verbal reasoning under emotional pressure. Practical, grounded and quietly perspective shifting for anyone who has ever said it and watched it make things worse. Includes PGC handout mapped to 2026 Nga Paerewa | Standards 90 minutes

WORKSHOP SIX  

The Meltdown 

 See the signs, stay calm, guide the way 

Every teacher knows the moment when a child tips. This workshop gives teachers a clear map of what is happening in the child's brain and body at each phase of emotional escalation, what helps and what doesn't at each stage, and why the teacher's own regulated presence is the most powerful tool available. The most practical workshop in the suite. Includes PGC handout mapped to 2026 Nga Paerewa | Standards 90 minutes  

 WORKSHOP SEVEN  

The Room as a Living System

How leadership, team harmony and shared understanding shape every child's experience

A dysregulated team creates dysregulated children. This workshop is for centre leaders and their teams together. We explore how the collective nervous system of a staff team shapes the environment every child lives in, what it means for every room to know what they are doing and why, and how leadership can offer the kind of real, regulated support that holds teachers the same way teachers hold children. When the whole centre shares a relational language, everything changes.