Marie Faust Evitt

I love helping children make discoveries, and showing teachers and parents how they can help children make discoveries, too. I'm known as Teacher Marie at the Mountain View Parent Nursery School in California. In my class of four- and five-year olds we explore a huge variety of questions - from how water flows to how far toy cars can travel on bumpy roads.

Teaching is my second career. I started out as a journalist writing about education, child development and parenting for newspapers and magazines. I was extremely fortunate that when I made the leap to teaching I was able to join the experienced team at the same school my two boys and I had participated in when they were young. I was so impressed with the learning taking place in our preschool program I said, "We should write a book."

You can guess what happened. I got to write that book with help from my assistant teacher, Tim Dobbins, and children's librarian Bobbi Weesen-Baer. We are thrilled that Gryphon House published Thinking BIG, Learning BIG: Connecting Science, Math, Literacy and Language in Early Childhood, and it won the Learning Magazine 2011 Teachers' Choice Award.

Educators often talk about the importance of hands-on activities. Teacher Tim and I encourage children to experience arms-on, legs-on whole-child learning. When they are curious about spiders, we build a giant spider web from string and tape. When they imagine they are outer space adventurers we turn the sandbox into the moon and explore how craters are formed. We incorporate math through games, build vocabulary by acting out words with American Sign Language, create large-scale art and dictate stories. The directions for these explorations and hundreds more are in the book, along with lots of tips I wish I'd had when I began teaching. You can see photos from our classroom at www.facebook.com/thinkingBIGlearningBIG.

Librarian Bobbi provides annotated lists of quality fiction and non-fiction books for each topic covered in Thinking BIG, Learning BIG, which she updates at www.thinkingBIGlearningBIG.com.

I enjoy speaking and giving workshops at national, state and local venues.

My husband and I like to hike, bicycle and do photography. Our two sons are really BIG now.