Creative self-expression for child and youth empowerment

Hi! Thank you for visiting my page!

My name is Silje and I am from Norway.

I am the founder of Young!ntro, a natural play system that helps young children learn ways of finding and expressing themselves through shared natural play.

The foundation of Young!ntro is its “Young Talking!” illustrated playing cards, which have been in development since 2016 and are designed to stimulate self-identification and creative expression in preschoolers in a natural, safe, and fun way.

The cards feature custom-designed illustrations related to specific social contexts such as emotions, hobbies, occupations, etc., allowing children to interpret them and freely express their associations through verbal and non-verbal communication and role-play. Each card also has keywords associated with its illustration to assist the supervising adults, parents, or teachers in facilitating and stimulating the game of interpretation-expression-through-play.

”Young Talking!” cards, by design, enable adults, parents, and teachers to paint an overall landscape of how their children see them, what they are interested in, what they like and do not like, what brings them joy, and what they are afraid of.

Importantly, “Young Talking” cards give adults, parents, and teachers an overall indication of how and what their preschoolers are thinking about the world they live in; such an important aspect is so easily lost in our current time-limited, hyper-technological, screens-based reality.

“Young Talking” helps to build understanding and trust and creates dialogue between children themselves, and also between children and adults, parents, and teachers.

Because our children are such precious resources for the future, I have kept the development of Young!ntro purposefully slow and taken great care in developing, refining, and testing each step before integrating it into the system.

And it works!

Young!ntro has conducted pilotgroups in groups with unaccompanied minors (refugees), and also with groups in a vulnerable community in Jinja, Uganda – both with success. Our last pilotproject, in 2025, has been with preschoolers in kindergartens. Children and staff members have enjoyed and found it useful to use “Young Talking” cards.

The success of the “Young Talking” cards in practice and positive feedback from parents, teachers and children have proven Young!ntro’s concept.

The next step is to create the very important “Young Playbooks” (two user manuals which show parents and teachers how to get the most out of playing with the “Young Talking” cards) and to produce the accompanying sets of “Young Talking” cards.

Your donations are dedicated to the graphic design and printing of the user manuals, the printing of the card sets, and the packaging of the manuals and cards to send to families and kindergartens who want to get playing!

Your donations will enable Young!ntro to pay the equivalent of $14.000 needed to produce 500 complete sets, but at the end of the day they will be worth so much more to the children, families and teachers.

Thank you!

More information may be found here: Young Intro