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Building Confidence Through Play-Based Learning.
Playground Powers was created to bridge the gap between what adults often expect children to know and what many children still need gently taught, modelled and practised.
The Founders
Meet the creators of Playground Powers
Playground Powers has been carefully crafted with clinical expertise, evidence-informed interventions, and play-based practice.
Joanne Lazarus
Founder & Speech Therapist
Joanne is a Paediatric Speech and Language Therapist. I am passionate about neurodiversity affirming practice and making learning explicit. I offer many years of experience in working with children with a range of social differences and language and communication difficulties.
Dr. Simonne Cohen
Founder & Clinical Psychologist
Dr Simonne supports is a Clinical Psychologist with over 10 years of experience working with children with diverse needs. I am passionate about making a difference to the lives of your children and have noticed the gap in the need for playground social skills.Clinical leadership
Why the program was created
Playground Powers responds to a very real gap in explicit playground-based social learning.
The gap
Children are expected to navigate complex social situations without ever being explicitly taught how and no current frameworks exist to teach these skills. Playground Powers fulfills this gap through play-based, interactive learning.
Why Stories and characters matter
Children learn best through stories they connect with and characters they remember. Stories slow social moments down, making them easier to understand, and together they give children a safe, clear way to practise real-life social skills.
Why playground moments matter
The playground is where rich social learning opportunities occur, and where children build confidence, resilience and self-esteem. Playground Powers sets children up with foundational skills to connect and thrive.
Our Values
Playground Powers offers a child centred approach to social learning and is designed to offer emotionally safe learning, explicit teaching, practical skill building and neuro-affirming strengths based support.
Safe Learning
Children relate to Playground Powers characters and stories making them feel emotionally safe, whilst providing practical solutions and emotion regulation techniques.
Explicit teaching
Children are taught explicit social skills to navigate social interactions through concrete language, guided examples and repeatable steps.
Neurodiversity-affirming practice
Through fun and relatable characters, children learn acceptance of neurodiversity, through exposure of different ways of relating, communicating and regulating.
Strengths-based support
The program fosters children’s confidence, resilience and self esteem by motivating them to practise playground powers, which in turn creates positive social interactions and experiences.
Practical skill building
Parents, educators and clinicians are given tools that can be easily relatable and translated into common interactions at home, in the classroom and clinic setting.
Evidence Informed
From every word chosen to the embedded emotional regulation strategies, PP is grounded in research on child development, emotional regulation, communication, and social learning.
