The Magical Wimmelbooks: Word-building and World-building in One Book Type

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Reading Time: 2 minutes One of my happiest childhood moments was when I got lost in books. After having a child, children’s books made me feel like I was reborn as a child, too. One of the most requested books in our household is In the Town All Year Round by Sussane Berner Rotraut. This was my first exposure to wimmelbooks, a special form of picture books with hidden objects. Dozens of small everyday scenes are represented within one image. Every page has something new to discover, adding …

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Types of People in a Company: Liquid, Rocks, and Islands

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Reading Time: < 1 minute As I said goodbye to my last job, I started to think about all the people I met there. While creating this mental list, I began to see a pattern. There were faces with no names, names that made me smile, and names that made me feel grateful. First, there are liquid people who fill a void, but when the door is opened, their names are gone from one’s mind. You might see them again on the streets, wave at them, but still, you …

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Crafting Intuition, from Chaos Theory to Motherhood

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Reading Time: 2 minutes At the end of one of his lectures, Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky recommended Chaos: Making a new science, a book by James Gleick. While reading it, the following quote struck me: When I came into this game, there was a total absence of intuition. One had to create intuition from scratch. Intuition as it was trained by the usual tools – the hand, the pencil, and the ruler – found these shapes [fractals] quite monstrous and pathological. The old intuition was misleading. The first …

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Screen Time Recommendations for Preschoolers

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Reading Time: 3 minutes My husband and I agreed that our daughter wouldn’t start watching videos until at least two years old. That translated into frustration, lack of free time for us, adaptation, and above all, playing and reading all the books again and again. And again. Before letting her watch anything, we watch on our own toddler/preschoolers TV shows du jour. Some of these shows are rude, disrespectful, consumerism-oriented, and have no real educative purpose. So, when Peppa Pig was out, I found that some of our …

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