Tumbling Over the Edge: Bev Bos and the Radical Wonder of Childhood

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A Big Thank You to Bev Bos

Rebecca Fox Stoddard

July 2025

Bev Bos (1934–2016) was an early childhood educator, author, and director of Roseville Community Preschool in California. Known for her fierce advocacy of play, creativity, and child-led learning, she inspired generations of educators to trust children, honor their process, and create environments rich with wonder, music, and real experience.

There’s a gesture Bev Bos used to make when she spoke—hand flat, tipping gently forward as if poised on a cliff. “Children,” she’d say, “are always on the edge of something. And if we’re lucky, they tumble right over."

This is a story about what happens when we stop trying to catch them.

I met Bev Bos in the early 1990s, at one of those early childhood conferences with rows of folding chairs and an audience full of tired teachers. She walked onto the stage—not with a PowerPoint, but with a song. And within minutes, she had the whole room singing with her. Laughing. Crying. Questioning everything we thought we knew.

Bev didn’t offer techniques. She offered a shift in posture—a way of being with children that dismantled control and re-centered trust. She spoke of mud and music, sorrow and joy, grief and laughter, all as essential parts of a real childhood. She made early education feel less like a field of study and more like a way of living.

The School That Grew from Song and Dirt

At Roseville Community Preschool in California, Bev created not a program, but a world. The space was alive: clay, paints, saws, song circles, rainwater potions. The curriculum wasn’t written in binders—it was lived. Every part of the environment whispered: “You belong here.”

There were no stars for behavior, no drills, no laminated charts. There were tools—real ones. Conflicts—real ones, too. And alongside them, the presence of adults who didn’t dominate or disappear, but stood close enough to witness and far enough to allow unfolding.

Bev called the classroom “a lab for living.” You didn’t learn to write because it was on the schedule. You wrote because you had something to say. You didn’t practice empathy through a lesson plan. You learned it by navigating a block tower disagreement while covered in sand. Here is a full playlist Curtis Kiwak Bev bos

Look beyond the poor quality video to this wondrous play area!

Trusting the Tumble

Bev Bos didn’t believe in preparing children for the future. She believed in giving them the fullness of life now. “If it hasn’t been in the hand,” she would say, “it can’t be in the brain.” That meant touch, texture, weight, sound. It meant real risks—both physical and emotional.

She defended play not as an add-on, but as the very foundation of development. Her book Tumbling Over the Edge: A Rant for Children's Play is exactly what it sounds like—a furious, loving defense of the sacredness of play, written in a voice that is both unapologetically fierce and deeply generous.

She didn't shy away from hard truths. She named what was being lost: curiosity under assessment, expression under compliance, connection under control. And she named what might be found if we stayed close to the edge: confidence, creativity, competence, compassion.

A Different Kind of Teacher

Bev’s presence as a teacher was magnetic. She was funny, irreverent, earthy. She didn’t demand reverence, but you gave it anyway. She trusted children not because they were easy, but because they were complex. And she trusted us, as adults, to stretch ourselves toward presence.

She didn’t simplify. She didn’t tell you what to do. But she did ask questions that rearranged your internal furniture.

What does it mean to really listen to a child?

What does your environment say about what you believe?

Who decides what matters in a classroom?

At her workshops, she would pass around objects: sticks, paintbrushes, things that dripped or broke or stuck together. She reminded us that children need real materials, real experiences, real relationships. “When in doubt,” she’d say, “let them play.”

Roseville and the Wider Movement

What happened at Roseville didn’t stay at Roseville. Bev’s books—Don’t Move the Muffin Tins, Before the Basics, Tumbling Over the Edge—circulated across the country like sacred texts for disillusioned teachers and curious parents. Her conference sessions with NAEYC and other networks drew thousands. She was a North Star for play-based, experience-rich learning, long before it was fashionable again.

But she wasn’t interested in trends. She was interested in children. And in the possibility that schools could become places where children wanted to go, not because they were rewarded or punished—but because they felt known.

The simplicity of her vision was deceptive. She wasn’t nostalgic or sentimental. She was radical. She wanted schools to stop trying to fix children and start building spaces where children could unfold. She believed in transformation through mud, through music, through connection.

My Own Tumbling

When I left that first session in the early ’90s, I didn’t have a neat set of notes. I had something more dangerous: a sense that I couldn’t go back to the way things were. I had already been questioning the way our culture treats children—how we praise and reward, how we interrupt play in the name of productivity, how we so often value control over connection. Bev didn’t offer tidy answers. She made the questions feel more alive. She showed me that children don’t need managing—they need presence, space, and deep trust.

That encounter opened something wider. In the years that followed, Bev’s work wove itself into other influences that continue to shape how I live and teach: the relational presence of Reggio Emilia, the quiet clarity of mindfulness, the vitality and reverence of deep nature connection. Together, they formed a kind of compass. And at the center of that compass was trust.

I went back to my program and started looking differently. I stopped over-explaining. I listened longer. I changed the space—not to make it prettier, but to make it more inviting. I let more in: more risk, more mess, more music, more mourning, more joy.

In that tumbling, I found something: the beginnings of real trust. The kind of trust that lets a child cry without rushing to fix it. That lets them build a volcano out of papier-mâché without knowing if it will erupt. That lets them climb a little higher. That lets me wait.

Nurturing Roots 2017-Can you see Bev’s influence on our program? 😃

Her Legacy, Still Unfolding

Bev passed away in 2016, but her legacy is anything but static. It lives in classrooms where children are trusted with real tools. In educators who refuse to standardize the soul out of childhood. In playgrounds where mud is welcome, and in homes where singing replaces scolding.

She gave us permission to believe that childhood doesn’t need fixing. It needs protecting. And it needs us—not as experts, but as companions on the edge.

Key Takeaways & Next Steps

What You Can Do Tomorrow:

Add one open-ended, messy material to your classroom or home.
Let a child lead you through their process without jumping in.
Sing with children. Not for them. With them.

Longer-Term Shifts to Consider:

Reevaluate your classroom design—what does it communicate?
Move from outcomes-based thinking to relationship-based presence.
Build a community of practice rooted in play, story, and song.

Questions to Live With:

What am I afraid will happen if I let go a little more?
Where in my teaching am I still holding too tightly?
What kind of adult do children become when they are trusted?

Challenge Your Assumptions:

Is safety your highest value, or is trust? How do you know?

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