I design joyful, standards-aligned learning for children who can see it before they can name it.

The problem

Sort feelings into three bins labelled happy, sad and mad, and a child has no way to tell annoyed from enraged, and so no reason to handle them differently. A chart that names an emotion and stops there hands over a label. What a child needs is an instrument.

Three moves, named twice

The activity asks a child three questions in order. Each one carries a construct a teacher or a product team would recognize, and the two registers were written side by side so that neither had to be translated later.

“How are you feeling right now?”

Emotion recognition and affect labelingEight feelings, each paired with a face that shows what the word looks like. The app will not advance until a feeling is named, because the label is the precondition for everything after it.

“What temperature are my feelings right now?”

Arousal appraisal and interoceptive awarenessThe child reads their own level of activation and places it on a cool to hot scale. This is the move most feelings charts leave out, and the one that predicts what the next ten minutes look like.

“How can I cool down?”

Strategy selection and self-regulationOffered on a warm or hot reading, with six concrete options a child can carry out alone. Choosing a strategy while the feeling still has a name and a size is the rehearsal that moves a child from co-regulation toward self-regulation.

My role

Both versions are mine. The original was a hand-coloured quadrant chart in my preschool classroom: each child’s photo on a velcro strip beside a crayon rainbow, cool feelings at the bottom, hot at the top. For the digital version I designed the flow and the interface, wrote the eight feelings and all forty intensity words, authored both language editions and the rationale for teachers and families, and built the standards crosswalk.

Design decisions

1. Let temperature do the cognitive lifting. Children already know that warm and hot are the same thing at different strengths, and that hot needs care. The chart borrows that intuition and lends it to feelings, so nothing new has to be taught before the tool can be used.
2. Five words per feeling. Every feeling carries a ladder, and the slider runs the full height of the rainbow for all eight. A child who pushes mad to the top hears “raging is a hot feeling.” This is vocabulary instruction wearing a slider, which is how an SEL activity ends up satisfying a first-grade literacy standard on shades of meaning.
3. Nothing needs reading. Every word is spoken aloud, so a three- or four-year-old can run the whole activity alone. A teacher operates one kind of tool. A child owns the other.
4. Offer strategies only when they apply. A warm or hot reading opens a second question, “how can I cool down?”, and six things a child can actually do. A cool reading skips it, because a cool feeling has nothing to bring down. Naming a strategy while the feeling still has a name and a size turns the chart from a mirror into a tool.
5. The monster is the child’s piece. It does exactly what the photograph on the velcro strip did: it belongs to one child and it is the thing that moves. Ownership was the part of the physical original most worth carrying across.
6. Bilingual because the classroom was. The paper chart was labelled in Spanish and English for a dual-language room. The toggle lets a child run the activity in the language they arrived in. The rationale for grown-ups was authored twice, once in each language.

Evidence & iteration

The physical version earned its keep first. It was how a four-year-old told the group where being bumped into had landed on the rainbow: medium-sized, orange. That sentence does not exist without the chart behind it. A child who can say “I am a little bit mad” has already done the appraisal work that keeps a little bit of mad from becoming a thrown block.

The digital version keeps the three moves that made it work: choose the feeling, show how big it is, decide on a strategy. It adds three the paper chart could never manage. Every word is spoken aloud. Each feeling carries five words. The whole thing travels home with a family. Run it at arrival, after a conflict and before a transition, and the same child at three temperatures in one morning becomes the curriculum.

The problem

Most feelings cards ask a child to name an emotion and then stop. That produces guessing, with the child hunting for the answer the adult wants. Inference from evidence is the harder and more useful task: reading a face, a body, a situation. It takes stories with enough context to argue about.

My role

I wrote both editions, designed the layout, and built the standards crosswalk. Fourteen illustrated situations, a teacher guide, and an alignment reference, in English and in Spanish.

Design decisions

1. Open-ended on purpose. There may be more than one reasonable answer. A child may name several feelings, change their thinking mid-conversation, or connect the scene to something that happened to them. The guide states plainly that all three are meaningful signs of development.
2. Ask for the evidence. The two anchor prompts are “What do you notice?” and “What makes you think that?” That single move turns a feelings card into an inference task with oral-language work attached.
3. Localize the children too. In the Spanish edition the characters are renamed. Evie becomes Emilia, so a Spanish-speaking child meets children carrying names from her own world. Same illustration, same situation, different reader.
4. Include the hard feelings. Exclusion (“You can’t play”), a lost lovey, a friend who keeps going after “stop,” a grownup who leaves for the afternoon. Contentment and delight are in there too, but a set that only covers happy is not usable on the day a child needs it.
5. Alignment offered as a guide. The crosswalk says outright that it maps connections, and that no single story is evidence a child has mastered a standard.

Standards crosswalk

Mapped to Head Start ELOF (P-SE 6, P-SE 7), Common Core Speaking & Listening for Kindergarten (SL.K.1, SL.K.2, SL.K.3, SL.K.6), and the California Preschool/Transitional Kindergarten Learning Foundations (2024): SED 1.3 understanding emotions, 1.4 regulating emotions, 1.7 understanding others’ thoughts and experiences, and 1.8 empathy and caring.

The problem

Abstract calendars do comparatively little work for children of this age. “Yesterday” can mean last week. The body and the senses do the work instead: the coat that goes on before outdoor time, the dark that arrives before pickup. The design problem was to take a real astronomical event and make it something a four-year-old could see, feel, name and belong to.

My role

I designed and taught this unit in a prekindergarten classroom, documented it, and then developed it into the guide. I authored all seven lesson plans, the standards alignment, the slide deck, and every appendix. All illustrations, diagrams, templates and page ornaments were drawn originally for this edition. No stock art anywhere in it. Four of the six songs are mine; the other two are traditional.

Design decisions

1. Science before culture. The flashlight-and-ball investigation sits in Week One, because children need the physical experience of the slanting beam before the cultural material will mean much to them. Week Two’s festivals then answer a question the science has already raised.
2. The art project has a destination. Every votive a child makes in Lesson 4 is carried into the Spiral Ceremony in Lesson 7, and children know that from the start. It turns an open-ended art experience into a genuine materials investigation with a reason.
3. Rehearse the shape before the event. The Spiral Center opens a full week ahead of the ceremony, so that by the time the class walks it for real the shape is already familiar and the room stays calm.
4. Culture presented as culture. Dongzhi, Yalda, Yule, Saturnalia, St. Lucia Day and Inti Raymi arrive as cultural information. The unit does not teach religious practice, and family participation is genuinely optional.
5. Assessment named as observable behavior. Each experience is mapped to Work Sampling, Teaching Strategies GOLD and HighScope COR. The guide then says plainly that programs on another system should substitute their own indicators, because the observable behavior is the part that matters.

Evidence & iteration

Everything in the guide has been used with four-year-olds. A daily sunset chart begins on day one and runs the full three weeks, so the children collect the evidence themselves and carry it home on Friday. This is the second edition: the ceremony now specifies battery lights so no family arrives worried about candles, and Appendix F carries a print-at-100% warning because the cut-out templates come out the wrong size otherwise.

The problem

Spanish orthography is shallow: roughly twenty-four phonemes map to their graphemes with near-perfect regularity, and the open CV syllable dominates. A child who knows five vowels and two consonants can read real words in the first weeks. That generosity is a trap for authors. It makes it easy to write text that is technically decodable and instructionally flat, or text that quietly admits sounds nobody has taught.

My role

Sole author. Four sequenced ten to fifteen minute lesson plans with teacher script in English and Spanish, differentiation and formative assessment criteria; one student-facing passage with a complete word-level decodability audit; print-ready syllable cards, word cards and a sentence strip; and framework notes covering orthography, syllable taxonomy, accentuation, a 24-point editorial QA checklist, and a bilingual glossary for editorial correspondence.

Design decisions

1. Write to the cumulative inventory. The legal set at any point is every element taught to date plus the taught high-frequency list. Write to the current lesson alone and you produce a page of ma me mi. Write to the full inventory and connected, meaningful text becomes possible this early. That is the difference between a worksheet and a book.
2. Stop at four lessons on purpose. It is far easier to demonstrate coverage of a large inventory than control over a small one, and control is what decodable authoring actually asks for.
3. Guard the schwa. /m/ is a continuant, so it can be stretched, which is exactly why teachers add a vowel to it and say “muh” for /mmmm/. That extra vowel is invisible now and is the reason blending breaks down three lessons later. The script says so out loud.
4. Keep /r/ out. Spanish carries two rhotics, and word-initial r is always the trill. Rosa and mira look harmless beside mesa, but each smuggles in a phoneme, a grapheme and a positional rule that has not been taught. This is the single most common error in early Spanish decodables.
5. Audit at the syllable, and publish the audit. The Lesson Four passage ships with a word-by-word table listing syllables, structure, elements, status and repetition count, so an editor can check the claim for themselves.

Editorial QA

Twenty-four checks in four bands run against a manuscript before it leaves the desk: sequence compliance, decodability metrics, language quality, and comprehension and art. The language band is the one machines cannot run. Does it read as Spanish or as English in translation? Are the subject pronouns over-explicit? Does the register carry adultisms in dialogue? Does the illustration support meaning while still making the child decode the word?

The problem

On a screen, art appreciation collapses easily into watching. And in a Spanish-language lesson there is a second risk: a child who is still building language will say nothing at all if the first thing asked of them is a full sentence about a painting. The lesson had to give children something to notice, then something to say, then something to make, in that order.

My role

I wrote and designed the whole lesson in Spanish: the artist selection, the works shown, the observation protocol, the studio task, the self-assessment checklist, the critique language, and the closing artist statement frames.

Design decisions

1. Silence comes first. Thirty seconds of mirada silenciosa before anyone speaks, then four sentence stems: Veo… Me pregunto… Siento… Me recuerda a… Every child gets a way into the language, including the ones who would otherwise stay quiet.
2. Four lenses, reused three times. Color, repetición, material, sentido are introduced as observation questions, then reappear as planning questions and again as critique questions. One vocabulary set carries the entire lesson, which is how new terms stick.
3. “No copies una obra.” The studio task borrows an idea and leaves the image alone. That single instruction turns a craft activity into a design problem, and the artist statement is later assessed against it.
4. An artist chosen for her materials. Falcone works with spice pigments and latex balloons as well as paint, so “what is it made of?” becomes a real question with a surprising answer. The cultural content stays contemporary and specific.
5. Assessment that is also language production. The lesson closes on frames: Mi obra expresa… Elegí estos colores porque… Repetí esta forma para… The evidence of learning and the Spanish output are the same artifact.

Evidence & iteration

Children self-check against a five-item lista de control del artista before the gallery close, including “I can explain at least one artistic decision.” The peer feedback protocol requires an observation before any suggestion (Noto… before Me pregunto si…), which keeps a five-minute critique from turning into a list of fixes.

My role

I evaluate AI-generated scoring against a structured, research-based rubric, using SEL and education expertise to judge the quality of authentic learner responses. Alongside the review work I contribute Spanish localization, captioning, video editing, dataset preparation, and product-quality feedback.

How the work moves

1. Study the framework. Understand what the rubric intends and where its distinctions actually fall.
2. Review learner evidence in context. Read the open-ended response whole, the way a teacher would.
3. Apply expert judgment. Distinguish depth, signal and sophistication.
4. Compare human and AI. Agree or disagree with the automated score, explicitly.
5. Identify patterns and edge cases. Notice ambiguity, prompt problems, recurring misses.
6. Feed it back. Document findings so they can change the product itself, and not only the score.

Where human judgment matters

Developmental context. Recognizing a meaningful idea while the articulation is still emerging. A five-year-old’s real insight rarely arrives in complete sentences.

Depth versus surface. Separating authentic understanding from language that merely sounds like it fits the rubric.

Ambiguity and calibration. Identifying the places where two reasonable reviewers would legitimately diverge, and saying so out loud.

What data changed

Across repeated reviews I look for patterns in the model’s scoring and in how learners interact with the content itself. When a prompt repeatedly fails to elicit the intended response, or when a scoring distinction produces recurring ambiguity, that is a content problem wearing a model problem’s clothing. It gets flagged and documented for the product team on those terms. In one project I reconciled a messy multi-source dataset with inconsistent inputs and poor translations, manually aligning it so it could support downstream product work.

Bilingual product quality

Spanish translation and localization, captioning, video editing, dataset preparation and content-quality decisions. I weigh register, dialect, age appropriateness, terminology and naturalness, especially in short-form learning experiences, where small language choices carry a great deal. The principle: accuracy is necessary; naturalness is equally important.

The problem

A visual schedule earns its place when a child can read it across the room and use it without an adult. The original set fought itself on that measure. A zigzag border and decorative frame competed with the illustration. The library was too small to cover a real classroom day. And “editable” described a file you could open, which is a long way from a file you can change.

My role

Designer and author of both editions: illustration, layout, the card taxonomy, the print system, and the seller-facing preview.

Design decisions

1. Keep the concept, replace the craft. Same font, cleaner border, sharper artwork. Teachers who already owned the set had to recognize it on sight. A redesign that reads as a different product loses the people it was built for.
2. One picture, one word. Every card pairs a single clear illustration with a short label on a white ground inside one calm frame. Nothing extra to decode, because the children who lean on a visual schedule hardest are the ones least able to filter a busy border.
3. Children of every background, throughout. Skin tones, hair, families and mobility aids run right through all seventy-two cards. There is no diversity page at the back.
4. Editable means actually editable. Label, border and illustration are separate selectable objects, and blank templates ship in both sizes. Rename a card, replace the art, restyle the frame, duplicate the page. It works in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides.
5. Organize by classroom flow. Seventy-two routines across eighteen pages, grouped as Start + Care, Learning, People + Community, and Creative + Play, so related cards print together and a teacher can prep one part of the day in a single pass.
6. Design for the laminator. Four cards to a page, true size at 100%, trimmed on faint dashed guides, sized to a 4 × 6 pouch. The PDF and the PowerPoint run in the same order, so the two never drift.

Before → after