About
Suzanne Axelsson is an early-childhood educator and pedagogical consultant in Stockholm with more than 30 years of practice. Over those years she built her own framework for how young children learn, which she calls the Original Learning Approach. The plain idea behind it is that play, learning and teaching are not separate stages but one woven activity, equally valued and dependent on each other. She came to Sweden from the United Kingdom and holds a master's in early childhood education from Sheffield University. The framework is her central work.
The framework runs on ten threads she returns to again and again: wonder, curiosity, joy, knowledge, imagination, interaction, risk, time, reflection and listening. She pictures learning as a cloth and the ten threads as what runs through it. Listening, in her telling, means taking children's own expression seriously as real input rather than noise. Time means letting learning happen at a child's own pace instead of on a timetable. Risk means letting children meet manageable challenge rather than shielding them from all of it. The threads are meant to be woven together, not ticked off.
The approach is a reflective practice inspired by Reggio Emilia, the Italian early-childhood philosophy she trained in, and AnjiPlay, a Chinese self-directed-play model. Her own contribution is the synthesis: she names and orders the ten threads herself and frames the approach as something that can sit on top of any teaching method rather than replacing it. She does not claim to have invented play-based education. She credits the traditions she draws on and builds a named, teachable practice over them. The practical target is early education that leans on testing and screens for very young children.
She teaches the idea across several surfaces. Her book, The Original Learning Approach: Weaving Together Playing, Learning, and Teaching in Early Childhood, was published by Redleaf Press, a small early-childhood specialist publisher in Minnesota. She has kept a blog, Interaction Imagination, since 2012, records a podcast, and presents on the early-childhood webinar and conference circuit. Her most active home now is a Substack she posts to several times a week.
Highlights
- Who
- Suzanne Axelsson, Stockholm-based early-childhood educator and pedagogical consultant with more than 30 years of practice
- Framework
- The Original Learning Approach, treating play, learning and teaching as one woven activity for the youngest children
- The ten threads
- Wonder, curiosity, joy, knowledge, imagination, interaction, risk, time, reflection and listening
- Book
- The Original Learning Approach, Redleaf Press, 2023, 200 pages
- Influences
- A distinct synthesis inspired by Reggio Emilia and AnjiPlay, layered onto any teaching method
Deeper Dive
The structure is what makes the framework more than a set of values. Most calls for more play in early education stay at the level of a slogan. Axelsson turns the case into a fixed vocabulary of ten threads and a single image, a loom, that holds them together. That gives an educator something to apply rather than just agree with. It also gives the idea a shape that can travel, which is why third-party schools and reviewers reproduce the same ten words in the same order. A teacher can pick up the threads and use them inside whatever curriculum they already run.
The honest part of the work is the lineage. Reggio Emilia and AnjiPlay are established pedagogies with their own histories, and she names both as influences rather than burying them. What she adds is the weaving: the claim that play, teaching and learning are mutually dependent, and the ordered set of threads that operationalise it. She is explicit that the approach can be layered onto Montessori, Reggio, or a national curriculum rather than competing with them. That framing lowers the cost of adoption and is part of why the idea has spread by practitioner word of mouth rather than by institutional mandate.
The application is the youngest children, which is where the stakes are highest and the temptation to measure is strongest. Her counter-proposal is that children learn through joy, curiosity, manageable risk and being genuinely listened to, at their own pace, and that this is undercut by test-driven, screen-heavy classrooms. She treats listening to a child as a real and demanding skill rather than a courtesy. The work is broadly humane and uncontroversial at its core: it is about helping small children grow through being taken seriously.
The idea travels across a deliberately layered set of channels. The book carries the full argument. The blog, kept since 2012, is the long-form archive where the threads were first worked out. The Substack carries the current, ongoing essays at a cadence of several posts a week, the most recent dated June 2, 2026. The podcast and the webinar and conference appearances carry the spoken version to other educators. The reach is sector-internal: findable inside the early-childhood world and largely invisible outside it, against three decades of practice and a steady publishing rhythm.
In Their Words
“I have developed a pedagogical theory called Original Learning where play and learning and teaching are equally valued and mutually dependent on each other.”
“The ten essential threads are wonder, curiosity, joy, knowledge, imagination, interaction, risk, time, reflection and listening.”
