Today marks my tenth Chinaversary. It’s no secret the most significant event I’ve experienced throughout my decade in China is motherhood, but second to that is the journey that led me to working with infants and toddlers and Montessori. “I don’t know how you do it…I wouldn’t last a day!” I hear this all the time and I always ask, “why not?” Often people have never really thought about it, nor asked themselves what exactly it is about young children…
I am an adult—therefore, I am a woman. This is something that really annoys me, but in the past I’ve also been guilty of referring to women as girls. But I’ve made a conscious effort to stop, because language matters. In the video, Mayim Bialik explains why we all need to stop referring to adult females as girls. And she backs it with science (Yay for Science!). The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is the theory that language one uses influences the way…
Fourth grade was a terrible, awful, no-good year! Okay, I’m being hyperbolic—but, it was the year that I was asked to stand in front of the class, pick up a piece of chalk and solve a mathematical problem. It was some sort of multiplication or long division or, as far as I was concerned, the most difficult mathematical problem ever created! To this day working with numbers sends a heart-stopping fear through me that I can’t explain, other than just…
“Now you look like a boy.” “So, I look like a boy because I have short hair?” “Yep.” My heart sank a little. I’d been chatting with two young sisters about differences for my uni assignment. In my years of working with young children, I’ve learned that conversations need to be organic and that you just have to follow their lead. And thus, how we landed on the subject of the differences between boys and girls, specifically hairstyles. When I…
Don’t ever mistake any moment with your child for anything less than a learning experience…for both of you. What do I mean? Well, tonight the Wild One said, “I draw A” during dinner and I looked up and she had used her fork to ‘draw’ on the walls (My fault, I was answering a text…during dinner). Of course, I was busy lecturing her on the appropriate use of the fork to look at the lovely lines she had scrawled on…