For young girls, every day is a new adventure of first-time experiences, discovering boundaries along the way. The entrepreneurial twist is to encourage girls to identify their problems and think about solutions to frustrations, focusing and improving on their ideas, with just enough guidance and assistance from grown-ups.
When I teach 5-year-olds, I’m continually struck by their imaginative take on the world. They have free associations that few adults can predict. Here are a few I’ve noted from my work with these gifted children:
- “I wish I could invent a candy magnet. You would just hold it up and all of the candy in the world would come straight at you.”
- “I wish we had ‘Happy Squirrel.’ Like ‘Happy Meals,’ but for squirrels, so they would come close and I could touch them.”
- “I wish there was no gravity. Then everything would float in the air, and when we lost something we could see it floating and could find it.”
- A 5-year-old spilled cream of wheat on her seatbelt: “I am trying to get it with my tongue, but my tongue is not the right size.” She paused. “A frog’s tongue is the right size.”
- At sunset: “It’s beautiful! That is my favorite color. It is peach. I wish I could go and touch that cloud.”
- “I wish everything cost one leaf. Then fall would be the best season.”
- On relativity: “When I am 10 years old, I am going to buy a horse…. Mommy, can you make three years pass faster? [Later] I just thought of a way to make three years pass faster. Do you want to know how? We can change the clocks! [Later] If I have a birthday and we don’t invite anyone, no one will know. My birthday is on January 2nd. Then I could have another birthday in February or April and I could turn 10.”
- To expand food choices: “Can we eat crow eggs or purple martin eggs? Why do we eat only chicken eggs?”
- Watching her mother struggle to cut open a package so securely sealed that it would have made NASA proud: “They should make a laser for cutting open packages. A laser would cut right through this.”
- When a 6-year-old girl awoke one morning, her first words were, “Why can’t we throw dinosaur bones in the lake?”
- After a rainstorm, a girl goes out in a rain jacket and her pants get soaked, prompting: “Why don’t they make ‘pants raincoats’?”
