IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. 

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#1 A five-year-old girl was fascinated by a nonfiction picture book about birds of prey, and spent a lot of time studying them in her classroom. She became an expert on bird shadows, and noticed a cartoon image on each page that didn’t make sense. She wondered where the bird was going to get salt. It’s not just children who can make those connections. I recently heard an interview with Mandy-Rae Cruikshank, a young actress who voices the character of Baby Hazel in the Pixar films Inside Out and Finding Dory. When I was writing this book, I asked Mandy-Rae if she would share some thoughts about the ways in which her work with her character, Baby Hazel, and her research into human emotions informed her work as an actor. She wrote the following in an email: I think that working with the Pixar team has taught me the most about how it’s possible to accurately translate or distill human emotions into animation, or to use real human emotions as a basis for animating fictional characters. -> Abby, a five-year-old girl, was fascinated by a nonfiction picture book about birds of prey.

#2 The key to scaffolding is to be there for your child when they are working at their edge, and to activate your own knowledge and experience as well as their interesting insights.

#3 Young children need to be educated, and they need to be educated by someone who understands them and their needs. This understanding takes place on two levels.

#4 The preschool paradox is the puzzling misalignment between children’s inborn ability to learn in virtually any setting and the inadequate early learning environments and suboptimal learning we so often find.

Summary of Erika Christakis's The Importance of Being Little

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