01
Relationship first, content second
An hour of curriculum that costs warmth is a net loss. Today foregrounds quotes, reading, and outdoor minutes, not completion counts.
Approach
Play is the work. Documentation is the assessment.
Yearkeep encodes an evidence-led early-years stance so that several adults with different languages, skills, and schedules can run it every day, and change any default they disagree with. These are the thirteen principles the product is built on, and the research behind them.
The thirteen principles
Each one shapes a screen. Where a principle comes from a study, we name it.
02
An input budget, not a lesson plan, for language
Children become bilingual on hours of real talk from several speakers (Place and Hoff, 2011). Yearkeep tracks hours per language per adult and warns before the week starts.
03
Executive function is the curriculum
Self-control at 3 predicts health and income at 32 (Moffitt and colleagues, 2011). Plan-Do-Review, pretend play, games with rules, waiting, and movement are the spine (Diamond and Lee, 2011). Subjects are the vehicle.
04
Prepared environment beats prepared lessons
Montessori classrooms with real materials and freedom of choice raise and equalise outcomes (Lillard and colleagues, 2017 and 2025). The shelf board holds eight trays and shows which one was ignored for two weeks.
05
Guided play is the default
The adult sets an invitation; the child directs the action (Weisberg, Hirsh-Pasek, and Golinkoff, 2013). Short explicit micro-lessons only for constrained skills, only when ready. No worksheets before five.
06
Dialogic everything
Dialogic reading adds measurable language growth (Mol and colleagues, 2008). Every book block shows PEER and CROWD prompts, and the same moves apply to cooking and walking.
07
Resilience is built by graded challenge
Risky outdoor play is linked to better health and social outcomes (Brussoni and colleagues, 2015). Fifteen mastery ladders replace pep talks; the adult waits thirty seconds longer than is comfortable.
08
Describe, do not evaluate
Praise for process at ages 1 to 3 predicts a learning mindset five years later; praise for the person does the opposite (Gunderson and colleagues, 2013). The word “clever” is not in the product.
09
Kindness is modelled and practised, never rewarded
Rewards reduce toddlers’ spontaneous helping (Warneken and Tomasello, 2008). There are no sticker charts. The playbook uses emotion coaching and repair.
10
Documentation is the assessment
Photos, transcripts, project panels, and adult observations are the record, as in Reggio practice. There are no tests and no child scores. The yearbook is the report.
11
Sleep, movement, and outdoors are load-bearing
The WHO guidelines for under-fives ask for three hours of movement and ten to thirteen hours of sleep. Those blocks are scheduled first and marked core.
12
No hot-housing
No flashcard programmes, no right-brain training, no “baby can read”. The library will not let you add one.
13
Rewrite at each birthday
The plan for 2 to 3 is firm. Ages 4 to 6 are a sketch, rewritten each birthday from your own documentation. The birthday review does this with your data.
Where it comes from
Five traditions, one household
Montessori
The prepared environment, practical life, and the shelf.
Reggio Emilia
Documentation panels, project inquiries, the hundred languages.
HighScope
Plan-Do-Review at every cadence and the six-step conflict routine.
Tools of the Mind
Executive function through pretend play and self-regulation games.
Dialogic reading
PEER and CROWD prompts on every book block.
Bilingual research
Input hours from several speakers, over-weighting the language with no street.
What we reject, and why
We do not put the child on a screen. Every study that shows a benefit for early screens shows a larger benefit for the same minutes spent with an adult.
We do not score the child. Scores make adults optimise for the score. Documentation makes adults look.
We do not gamify the adults either. There are no streak nags at 9pm. If completion drops, the monthly review suggests removing blocks, not adding reminders.
We do not sell a method. Families keep what works. The library is invitations, not doctrine.
Foiy, the heritage
Yearkeep began as Foiy Home. Foiy (ފޮއި) is Dhivehi for book. The family that built it is Maldivian, lives in Kuala Lumpur, and needed one language to be over-weighted at home because it has no street outside the door. That constraint is now a feature every family can use.
Run this stance every day, with whoever is there
The principles are free to read. The product exists so the whole village can keep them at 8am without a textbook.