Banner with orange background and an image of three children reading

Banner with orange background and an image of two children reading

About Highlights Early Learning

For nearly 80 years, Highlights has existed to help children connect with their power to learn, create, and become their best selves. Through Highlights Early Learning, we are extending this legacy and Highlights’ closely held philosophy to early childhood education settings to:

Offer resources that speak to children on their terms and through activities, stories, and concepts that generations of children before them have shaped through our direct interactions with them

Image of children reading with their teacher

Help educators delight children as they learn so they see learning as a joyful reward they want to continue to seek and achieve

Teacher playing with blocks with her students

Support educators as they help all children connect with a sense of self and self-worth, their confidence as capable and creative learners, and their compassion for all people and creatures—all through purposeful play and irresistible fun.

To engage with children has been a privilege. As is the opportunity to do the same through the remarkable and vital preschool educators who nurture and guide them.

We thank you for considering Highlights Early Learning for the important work of helping children become their best selves—work that we hope we can make even more joyful, fun, and fulfilling for you.

Our Story

Highlights Early Learning was established in 2023, but our roots date back to the 1940s, when Highlights for Children was founded…

Read more about our story

Husband and wife Gary and Caroline Myers—Highlights’ co-founders and experts in child psychology and education—brought their vision for a magazine for children to life in June 1946, when the first issue of Highlights magazine landed in some twenty thousand children’s hands. Consensus at the time was that childhood was a passive experience, where children were the product of praise, discipline, and little else.

Gary and Caroline were among their few contemporaries who believed otherwise. They saw children as brimming with potential that is best cultivated through play, books, reading, wonder, delightful puzzles and games, and—most critically—respect. To them, childhood was a short, sweet season not to be diminished or squandered. Instead, it was to be honored, celebrated, and leveraged through activities and opportunities that cultivate children’s curiosity, caring, creativity, and confidence so that they may become their best selves as they also fall in love with learning.

This was the belief system that compelled the Myers to launch Highlights. And it is the belief system that has driven every Highlights for Children decision and product to this very day—including the launch of Highlights Early Learning.

In the nearly 80 years since the first Highlights issue, several generations of Highlights employees have carried on the founders’ vision and created Highlights games, stories, customs, and characters. Generations of team members have engaged directly with children, learning from them what it feels like to be a child in a rapidly changing world. We’ve made a point to evolve our offerings based on what children share with us, but the belief that purposeful play is the work of childhood and that every child deserves respect has remained constant.

In 2023, we decided to extend the Highlights philosophy to early childhood education (ECE) settings. We saw an opportunity to partner with ECE experts to help us take beloved Highlights approaches and activities, layer them with developmentally appropriate pedagogy, and offer curricular products for preschools that help educators find more fulfillment as they help students find joy in learning.