19/05/2026
Something hit my window late one May evening and I had to stop and look.
It was a cockchafer beetle. Enormous, brown, completely unbothered by me. I stood there for quite a long time working out what it was.
Then I had to draw it, and somehow that turned into making an entire insect alphabet.
That sort of thing happens to me quite regularly.
Last week I fell down an internet rabbit hole reading about an Italian educator called Loris Malaguzzi after seeing the Princess of Wales visit Reggio Emilia. I should probably have been working.
His idea was that children arrive in the world already full of ways of knowing. Drawing is one. Making things is one. Quietly crouching on a path to study a beetle is one.
He called them the hundred languages of children.
I am very much not an educator. But reading that, I had the odd feeling that I’d accidentally been working from the same instinct for years without knowing it had a name.
I wrote more about it in this week’s journal blog post if you'd like to read it.
Link in bio.
