My Passion For Education Through Play

Hi, I am Diana Jensen, the founder of Joyscovery, a multilingual preschool teacher with a passion for creativity and fun. 

My road here has been anything but linear, I received my MA in Intercultural Communications from Copenhagen Business School in 2014 and worked as an international flight attendant for multiple years while running my own social media marketing company and later I worked as the marketing director of a video production company. 

2020 put things in perspective and my passion for early education and the general well-being of young children grew stronger. I left my marketing career behind and started a new degree in Early Childhood Education and a new daily routine home preschooling my niece, who I call M, and her best friend O, who were 2.5 years old at the time we started. 

Learning all the theory and research behind child development and how children learn is fascinating to me and being able to put it into practice straight away with my niece has been an immense joy, which is how Joyscovery was born. I realized through doing and sharing my experience that not everyone thinks as creatively as I do and with more and more pressure on classic academics a lot of learning through play for preschoolers has been lost to worksheets and boring memorizing. Don’t get me wrong, memory is very important and some worksheets can be good if done the right way 😉

I quickly realized that to keep the attention of 2-year-olds the lesson plans had to be fun! They are naturally very curious and want to discover everything. The sentence I most hear during the day are “Daidai, what are you doing?” and I reply “preparing an activity” to which they reply “I want to do it!” and then they learn about dinosaurs, numbers, shapes, colors, trucks, letters, sounds, sizes and much much more in English and Spanish, while developing their fine and gross-motor skills. Exploring their creativity, using their senses, learning how to be good friends to each other, and giggling (for the most part because, well toddlers) all the way through our mornings.

I make up most of our lessons and activities on the go, in the moment, and with what we have (I am a big fan of using boxes, crates, and bottles before they go to recycling). I can do that because I have learned the theory of what is important and HOW they learn, so I can quickly gather up some objects and set up an activity for them, sometimes they love and engage with it, sometimes they lose interest after 2 minutes. I have tried and tested hundreds if not thousands of different games and activities and want to share the best ones with you!

I post our favorite activities and our journey here on Joyscovery.com and on social media, check us out and follow along on Instagram or Facebook, wherever you hang out, and make sure to sign up for our newsletter ( I don’t send many out) for some activity sheets to do together with your child.*

*A little note on activity sheets: I have a few printables and make new ones every time I can’t quite find what I need in the playroom, these are not meant for the child to do on their own with just a crayon, these are for an adult to engage with the child and do together, talk about the activity, get some real-life items to compare, play the game together, etc. each sheet has instructions, just wanted to add this in here in case you were thinking “she said she doesn’t like worksheets yet she makes them!??”