Lucia Martino

FOUNDER AND TEACHER

Instead of a boring “Who We are”, let me tell you my story…

I was born in a small town in the north of Spain, Asturias. A place where all our neighbors were family, where we took care of each other, where the street, nature and friends were part of our learning. 

Going out to play in the street with our friends while breathing that pure air made us feel so free…. What child of the 80’s does not remember the games we used to play out there? At least I remember it like it was yesterday.

The best afternoons were on Fridays during summer… We would play in the street until almost ten o’clock at night, until mom called us from the window that it was time to come back for dinner.

 My brothers and I didn’t always go up to dinner in the best shape. Mom wasn’t worried about the dirty shirts or bruised knees, although she always had solutions for both.

Ours was a generation that grew up on the street. It was our meeting place with friends. We had fun with a series of games, in many cases inherited from previous generations. I remember playing the typical Spanish games: “The English hide and seek” (without moving hands or feet), rope, churro, “half sleeve full sleeve”, marbles, yo-yo …

One of the boys’ star games was soccer. Playing soccer is, indeed, the passion of children of many generations. Ours enjoyed them using those open spaces where goals were made with two stones.

That image of the groups of girls playing in the street or in the schoolyards, playing hopscotch, no longer exists, it is from another time.

It was possibly the last generation to have the street as the setting for their games. For the new generations, the arrival of electronic games , computers and the increasingly intense traffic in cities  created a different way of having fun and socializing.

Now, instead there are great infrastructures where there are official fields prepared for this and other sports, but before, what we had was creativity, and our field was created with imagination.

 This was a slow way of life that surely many of us would like to escape to, where simplicity and calmness took on a new meaning. We were children growing up in the middle of nature, surrounded by animals and disconnected from the amount of over stimulation that today’s children receive. I, without a doubt, would sign up to live that childhood again.

Even with society having changed so drastically, we can still make a difference in our children’s childhood. By bringing our memories back we can make this happen. Childhood isn’t about having the best technology, crazy homework, and memorizing concepts . It’s actually the opposite. It’s about simplicity. It is about freedom. Freedom to explore, to find yourself and live the life you want because, after all, they have the right to live our same childhood. That is my story, that is Little Creative Souls.

Dana Biddle

TEACHER

I was born in upstate New York and grew up with four distinct seasons: summer, fall, winter and spring. All of my childhood memories took place outside, in fact the more that I think about it, all of the most vivid moments in my life have taken place outside so far. Building snowmen with my sister until my hands and nose were numb in the winter, rolling around with my dog in muddy rain puddles that formed in the spring, the feeling of campfire smoke in my eyes after a long day at the lake in the summer, and getting lost with my friends in bright orange colored leaf piles in the fall. 

My parents love to explore and always took my older sister and I along on their hiking, swimming, biking, camping, and fishing adventures. My father approached the number of miles or size of a wave that lay ahead of us with a sense of fearless curiosity and marvel. My mother was always there with her sense of humor, patience and compassion when my sister or I got hurt or felt limited by our size or strength. 

Looking back on my childhood my parents gave me freedom and love and school gave me community and purpose. Finding all four things in one place has been a challenge in my life but I have found a few to prove that those places do exist in the world! A place that has told me that I trust you to take care of yourself and others and that its okay to need more time, it’s okay to change your mind, and it’s okay to question why. Little Creative Souls has become one of those places in my life.

Verónica Castro

EVENTS TEACHER

 I grew up in Peru ,by small magical town surrounded by rivers called chaclacayo. I lived with all my cousins at my grandmother’s house. What I always remember from my childhood days, are all the different ways that our imagination experienced my grandmothers yard,one day we were astronauts who arrived on a new planet and toured the entire garden with a thousand adventures, another day we were scientists and that created magical potions with water, earth, flowers and plants. She also had these giant stairs that became a huge stage and we were famous rock stars performing. We always had something in mind, we never got bored. We played until it was time to eat and that was also a wonderful time because we ate all together on a large wooden table, we felt like we were living in a palace.For me those times bring me lots of beautiful memories, memories of what we did every day. The type of memories that you always kept in your heart, and today I share them with my two daughters. I teach them that it is okay to play, to be creative and that asking questions is encouraged, to never feel that we are being too curious. Curiosity is part of our development, as children we are like this by nature. 

When I write this I set myself as an example, because I also feel like a girl to this day, and that’s how I connect with my inner child, through curiosity, exploration and creativity. When I’m with my daughters I take out that girl who lived in that magical valley.