Episode 163: Teaching Early Literacy Skills Through Music & Storytelling with Emily Cadiz of Prelude Early Learning
Emily Cadiz is a teacher, musician, mom of three, and founder of Prelude Early Learning, home of Finnegan the Dragon. After a traumatic brain injury left her needing to relearn how to talk and walk, she rebuilt her skills through music and singing—an experience that inspired Prelude’s music-based approach to teaching language and pre-reading. With 20+ years in education and master’s degrees in education, special education, and music, Emily has created an NIH-supported program that’s shown up to 250% growth in early literacy skills.
In our talk, Emily dives deep into her accident and her history as an educator. She emphasizes why she advocates for inclusive music in classrooms, rather than traditional speech therapy. She also has some great advice for those transitioning from education to entrepreneurship.
Topics Discussed:
How to combat the decline in functional language due to excessive screen time
Outdated practices in music education
The importance of human connection in learning
Resources mentioned:
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Emily Cadiz is a teacher, musician, mom of three, and founder of Prelude Early Learning, home of Finnegan the Dragon. After a traumatic brain injury left Emily needing to relearn how to talk and walk, she rebuilt her skills through music and singing, an experience that inspired preludes music based approach to teaching language and pre reading skills. With 20 plus years in education and master's degrees in education, special education and music. Emily has created a program that's shown up to 250% growth in early literacy skills. Welcome Emily. So nice to have you here.
Emily Cadiz 0:33
Thank you, Lily. I'm excited to be here.
Lily Jones 0:36
Yes, so Well, I would love to start with your story, and I know it's remarkable how you came to create Prelude early learning. Can you tell us that story?
Emily Cadiz 0:47
Sure, it's kind of a long story, so I'll try to keep it short well, and I think that it's, you know, at the time that this injury happened in the classroom, we weren't really talking about teachers being injured in the classroom, and if we were talking about it, it was super controversial, or there was a lot of shame and blame involved. And honestly, I think we're coming to the realization that maybe, maybe schools aren't well. Schools aren't medical care facilities, and we are often in situations where, you know, people are making decisions about theories that may be great in a medical grade facility, but aren't going to actually translate into a school building, because we aren't we aren't equipped. We are not medical care providers. But with all of that said, no one was set up for success in this situation, and I was pretty severely injured in the classroom. I did lose my ability to turn thoughts into words for about a year and a half, it did get progressively better, but I had to Take some assertive steps to get my recovery going. And part of that recovery process was utilizing music. It is fairly common thing for people to use when they are acquiring or reacquiring language. In my case, you know, it was medical grade interventions, but I was also in a previous life. Before I became a teacher, I was a professional musician, so it felt really natural to use it for this recovery process. In fact, it was so much easier to do for me than it was traditional speech language therapy, because, I mean, music's fun. It really is, even when you're bad at it, or even when you're, you know, you don't think you're great at it. It's, it's more fun sometimes to do music than it is traditional medical grade therapies and and that is what I used to get my brain, I would say back online, and I was so fascinated with it that I ended up going back to school to study it to say, I wish knowing what I know as an educator and what we're facing, and really the decline in what we see in functional language development prior to kindergarten because of massive consumption of passive screen time. How can we use this to really mitigate the damage that we are seeing in real time? Because when you don't have functional language, when you don't have the language skills to communicate and get your needs met, what we end up seeing is behavior replacing that language and and we all have seen that, which led me to my injury. So I ended up going back to school. I ended up studying this. It took a lot longer than I really wanted. Everything's taken a lot longer than I really wanted. No one in the world of music has adopted any practices to to jump into the 21st Century of teaching and learning. They're they're really like, still. They're like, back there. it is old school. And they're like, Nope, we have class at 8am and you're like, Yeah, I have a real job I got to get to at a so it took some creativity on my part, even to go back to school to do this. And then once I got into the research, and once I said, Yeah, I want to, I want to take all of these methodologies that live in these silos of medical grade interventions, and pull them into the places where children live most often, which is their classroom or their educational facility or their care facility, so like daycares and preschools, and give these tools to the people who actually need them, like boots on the ground, not people who are meeting with kids for 30 minutes once a week in a, you know, a secluded environment, but really like the people who are. Putting in like 10 to 12 hours a day with children. And it cannot be that the best tools are housed only for medical grade interventions. By the time you are getting to a medical grade intervention, sometimes it's too late.
Emily Cadiz 5:18
Oftentimes it's too late.
Lily Jones 5:20
Yeah.
Emily Cadiz 5:21
So, you know, my my goal was to say, Well, what does inclusivity look like? What does inclusive music look like? And I didn't want to say this was music education, because it's not. This is really using music as a vehicle to get that language and that early literacy bridge really solidly built. I mean, if we call it music education, then everyone says, Well, that's the music teacher's job. It's not, I mean, no offense, but, like, I've got some bones to pick with. Like, people saying it's the music teacher's job. Right side initiatives, oh, my god, barf. Throw this out. Kick them to the curb like you're you're the right side of your brain is not what I'd call an accessory to the left. But thank you. And then I would say the last part of it was using the term therapy like it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be provided by a therapist or a medical grade person in order for it to be accessible, usable, enjoyable and practical. So I took all those things out and said, Okay, we're just going to call it inclusive music. And there are a few people at the time calling it that all over the world, like some down in New Zealand, some over in Finland, very, very few were actually using it here in the US. And people really wanted to put me in a pigeon hole. They wanted to say, well, just go into this and just do this and just make it this. And I'm like, That's comfy for you, huh? Because that really tells you you're still, you know, doing the right thing by children. And I'm going to say no. And I was told no a lot over the four years that I was studying this and starting to create this product. And it was the first people that said yes were some private investors in the state of Oregon. The second people that said yes to this were in the National Institutes of Health. And we got an SBIR phase one grant, which is a large chunk of change to go and create the rest of this and study it. And those two bodies, those two I call people, just gave us enough hope to keep going. And so now we're here. Now we're to market. And now we have a whole new thing we have to deal with, which is like, how do you sell something? You make as educators, we don't sell stuff.
Lily Jones 7:41
Yeah, it's a whole new thing.
Emily Cadiz 7:45
Yeah, we make stuff and we do it every day. It's part of our job. We never consider like what we're doing. We have to go monetize it. We do it because it's our life. It's our life's work. That's what we do. We're called to do this work. We do this work and we get paid. But it's not like we are ever thinking, Oh, I wonder how I can take this and a, you know, a money making thing. So that is a whole new concept I have to use in my noggin, because that's not how my wiring is. My wiring do this for free and continue to do this for free for the rest of my life, I would.
Lily Jones 8:22
Mm, hmm, yeah, it's a whole new set of skills. And you're right. It's something we haven't done much as educators, and let's definitely talk more about that later on, of kind of like what you've learned and how you've moved into that role. But before we do that, I want to hear a little bit more about what you've created. Can you tell us a little bit about Prelude, early learning and what you offer?
Emily Cadiz 8:41
Sure. So my feeling is that technology, and I'm not alone in this feeling, what's really created and rolled out with like zero thought to how it's affecting brain development. And it started off on a big screen in movie theaters, it became into our homes. It's a television, then it went to a computer, than a laptop, than a mobile tablet, then it's floating all around our house. And over time, the amount of screen time we have we are, oh, look at that. Oh, my God, even the internet agree with me. But over time, this has become a very large part to our world, and we have yet to pause and say, well, we didn't quite think about how this was being presented, or maybe how it's affecting people, or ideally how we would use it now. It's omnipotent. It's everywhere. Even if you say, Oh, my child's in a screen-free world. No, they're not. I'm like, they're not. They see you on a screen. They see screens everywhere. So it is a part and parcel of their world. But how we introduce it, how we use it, was the foundation of Prelude early learning, and then with every problem, as a special education teacher, we look at things as both, like the reactive management part. How do you close the gap? And how do you address the root cause? So we knew that when we were dealing with screens, we had to do both things. We had to address the leg in the classroom in real time. As soon as we see the disruptors starting to really disrupt the natural brain development process around agent two, we have to have something you can go in and say, here's a mitigation, here's here is a way in which we can start closing that gap before it gets bigger. Because as teachers, we know gaps do not close on their own. They just get larger. So that was our first offline this was our task for offline learning. And then our online piece was, how do we start turning the dial and say, We have to change the conversation from screens as a service to replace human interaction to using them as a tool to reinforce what children have learned offline. Wholeheartedly, we believe, everyone on our staff believes that human connection, human to human teaching, is of more importance now than ever before, that we have to learn how to communicate with each other, regardless of what we're talking about. We have to learn how to listen and respond from the time we are born all the way up. A lot of us are still working on that, me included, and we have to start looking at screens as what they can do to benefit our lives as a tool, but not take over our lives as a service. And that, I think we're at that place now where we can have that conversation. We can start saying, Okay, how do we do this? How do we collectively do this? And that is what Prelude early learning is really all about. It's that two sided solution to a two sided problem, and we call it a blended learning system. And blended learning systems are the way in which most school districts are saying, This is how you use AI best. Yes, we love AI, but no, we don't want AI being the replacement to human interaction. We need you working with children, or children working with each other, or they're the adults in their life, and AI can be used as a complementary tool to reinforce that or enrich that initial point of connection that was established, I want to say, probably five years ago by many, many School Districts when looking at their policies on AI. I took that policy and that same thought and said, well, we should start doing that here, not waiting until they're in middle school, when we know most of their cultural currencies and the way they value certain interactions have already been established, but do it from from the time that they're born, and give parents some guiding, just some booze in the water so they're not crashing. This is like in America, this is like no man's land. You know, birth to six is the most difficult time, because the brains are growing exponentially fast and we have zero formal oversight. Yeah. It's also either expensive as heck or it's free, and you have to live in extremes to afford either thing. Absolutely.
Lily Jones 13:12
I mean, I think I was a former kindergarten teacher myself, just being like so I see a little bit of that, and then with my own kids, you know, as they were growing in that phase. So yeah, I mean, there's a wide range of experiences that kids have, zero to six, and so I appreciate that focus on how how important it is, and how that really is such a formative time. And so can you tell us a little bit about Prelude, early learning, and Finnegan the dragon, like, how do you connect with kids? How do kids interact with the stories that you tell? And what's the role storytelling plays?
Emily Cadiz 13:52
Well, we'll start with Finnegan. So when, and you know, this is a kindergarten teacher, because I call it the sandbagging of kindergarten teachers in America, we say, everybody below kindergarten says, well, the kindergarten teacher will take care of this. The kindergarten teacher garden is always like, well, the kindergarten teacher should have taken care of this. Yeah. Like, I need a break.
Lily Jones 14:13
Yes,
Emily Cadiz 14:13
I want you to help me. California has done a great job. They brought in transitional kindergarten. I hope they're coming around with universal PK as well, because I truly believe that there's a new emerging, I would say grade level. You know, like we have, typically, it's K to third. And I'm like, Why? Why are you doing that to kindergarten teachers? First grade, the work's been, I mean, the the real work's been done. Um, you know, pktk Kinder is this new, emerging group that really needs to be established and and given its its due time again. This is not like an accessory to your K 12. This is like it. K 12 will be successful if you have a good pktk Kinder system in place to be able to educate parents, to support them, to give them a community, because many people don't have that. But I digress. So back to what you know Finnegan does. Well, we have no choice but to serve families where they're at because that's what we are given as public servants. We don't get to rewrite the rules or shame them or say, Well, you should be doing this, and you should be doing that. I'm like, historically, we can look at almost every single abstinence based program that is like, coming from the angle of shame and shaking your finger and say, Well, that was a gigantic waste of money, and it did nothing to really reverse the trends or replace the behaviors that we wanted it to replace, knowing that we had to start with a character, because that's what children are used to. They're used to seeing this. And if we were going to start doing a replacement, we had to make it seamless, we had to make it sticky. We had to make them want to do it. We had to make it look like everything else they were seeing. So the in class things are not an and to the teacher, they aren't. They are simply a reconfiguring and rewriting of things that they're probably already doing in a preschool transition kindergarten class, or a kindergarten class and and, and really focusing on sound sound awareness, because reading starts with talking. Reading starts with sound awareness. The best way to play with sound is through music. So we came down here. We created this dragon. We said, Okay, this little dragon, he doesn't have fire. So if he doesn't have fire, what does he do? He sings, you know, that's his little adventure that he's on. He's finding his fire. And we go through all those initial sounds that children are learning to make, and that you'll probably see most often in your initials. You know, the beginnings of reading with the science of reading. And we connect those in kind of a seamless way through preschool, transitional kindergarten and kindergarten. And you get to follow this cast of characters, this cast of little dragons and their friends, and you get to bring it alive in the classroom through what children love. They love story books and plushies. They love to sing songs and engage with each other. They love to get their hands dirty and their bodies moving. And then we couple it up with this digital piece that parents can then integrate really seamlessly into their home, continuing to sing with their child, go over the sounds with their child, play with their child in a way that increases the number of words they're using and without having to do a whole lot other than that, package it around. You know what we we think children should be, you know, really focused on during this time. You don't have to do much. You don't have to you have to look at letters. Yet in preschool, letters mean nothing. They are glyphs. My hand means more. You just don't need it. And then you can fade into that as you get into kindergarten. Heck, you can fade into like CVC words with about 10 letters total is if you have a real grasp on sound and syllable awareness and rhyme and onset sound production. If you can do that as a four year old, you can read. You don't need to know 26 letters and 44 sounds. You can know like thing that sound play. So that's what Finnegan does. He brings kids and families together, classroom and home, and we practice the same things, but we do with through music.
Lily Jones 18:46
So engaging. And I love both the story of not being able to breathe fire. I mean that automatically seems like tell me more, bringing in the family connection too, because, as we know, especially with little kids, that is so important. And I know that you found great success with this method, that you found up to 250% growth in pre reading skills through Prelude system. And can you talk a little bit more about like, Why do you think what is the difference between and you've gotten into this some but like, what is the difference between your approach and traditional methods?
Emily Cadiz 19:22
Traditional methods take what has worked in a first grade classroom and tries to water them down for preschool kids, and they say, Oh, if it works for a six year old and we change it, it'll work for a three year old. Let me just tell you, I'm 50, and if I looked back at what I was doing at 25 and tried to do that now, at 50, my body needs different things. I'm not person. It's twice my age. The same thing for a three year old and a six year old. So that, first of all, traditional methods are built for six year old brains, not three year old brains. We'll start with that 100% yes, and you have to build things for three. Three year old brains, two year old brains, three year old brains, four year old brains. It doesn't have to live in the 100% column. It doesn't have to be a scripted didactic. Do it my way. You know, do it like in these particular steps, because children are kind of all over the board at that age, right? You're at the mercy of their world. So play and music can be done in many different ways. It doesn't have to be done at circle time. In fact, I tell most teachers stop doing circle time, please, for your music, or for many things. I mean, it's not nobody bought a ticket to to a concert to hear you sing straight up. You're not Adele. There's one Adele two when I'm in the car, and she doesn't know it yet, but shout out to Adele there. But you know, it's not a concert. This is about music to get kids using their language towards you, which means you might have to use it in a place where they feel more comfortable, which is like, you know, parallel play against their world, build plaques with them and sing songs. Do it during transition times. Do it during times when they are a little more at ease in their world, and not necessarily toe to toe, when you're trying to get them to sit and listen and do all of these things that three year olds don't really love to do anyways. I mean, they'll do it, but that's a skill into itself. So maybe if you're going to do literacy instruction, meet a little more where they're at. So we knew that we had to make it modular. We knew we had to make it interactive. We knew we had to make it loud, and we knew we had to get sound going. So we started thinking like a three year old, not a six year old. That's where we started. And we did a lot of observation. We did a lot of I mean, we have personal experience of 25 years of teaching special education children. I have experience working in kindergarten classrooms as a special education, you know, self contained teacher, which is like almost, I would say it's as close to preschool as you're going to get. And then I also have my own children that I raised. And, you know, I remember my three year old who did have a reading disability and didn't know it take the ABC book and she tossed it across the room. She's like, I hate the ABCs. And she left. He's in college now. She's doing fire. I could care less. So sitting and doing things the way we think learning should look had to be reimagined, and we had to meet them right where they were at, meet them on their terms, and get everyone comfortable with how we did stuff. And to be honest, singing, playing with music is far more approachable than trying to get parents, maybe that speak two different languages that are incredibly busy working two and three jobs to pay for daycare or school or what have just their rent and food. You're talking about like, what's the more accessible thing to get those foundational skills? It's not going to be books. It's going to be music, because it lives. I mean...
Lily Jones 23:08
Yeah! Kids coming home and sing songs too, right? Like the kids naturally bring that home, because they come home. I mean, even now, my kids are 10 and 13, but they'll be like, singing something under their breath. You know? It'll be like, Oh, what are you singing? And so I think that naturally, like, brings it home in a really cool way. And I appreciate....
Emily Cadiz 23:25
When they're older you may not want to ask that question.
Lily Jones 23:28
yeah, maybe not.
Emily Cadiz 23:30
Three girls were, like, in middle school and high school at the same time, I stopped asking questions. Oh, I don't want to know.
Lily Jones 23:38
No thank you. But I appreciate just the focus on developmental appropriateness, and I think, as a kindergarten teacher and now working in ed tech and educational publishing for like many years, oftentimes you're right, like the products created or the curriculum created for young kids, whether kindergarten or preschool are seen as just like mini versions of this bigger, older curriculum or older approach. And that's not how it works. And so I think the disconnect has gotten bigger and bigger, and I agree. I'm in California where I agree, having the universal TK is amazing, and I also get worried sometimes about the approaches that are being used in TK or pre K.
Emily Cadiz 24:27
Yeah, and administrators are out of there. They're far out of their lane, absolutely far out of their lane as they can possibly get, because they have been trained on a K 12 model, which is really, you know, education, pedagogy andragogy as you get even, you know, into workplace education, you're talking about healthcare. This is healthcare. This is, this is the, you know, if you were talking about all of education being the intersectionality between healthcare, human development and like academics, it. If it was a sliding scale, this is as far to health care as you're going to get. And health care. That's why we work with the National Institutes of Health, not the Department of Education. You know, we work with people looking at brain development, speech and language I work with speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, developmental pediatricians. We don't work with educators in the traditional sense. We have a few that are there because we know where we're headed, but they know the world down here far more than we know it. So using their expertise to really say, oh, it has to be approached differently. Is, it's not just a little thing, it's a big thing. So, yeah, so that's kind of where you're like, the approach had to look differently. And we was, remember, it was all gas. This was a big scientific experiment, and that's what you write an SBI. You go, this is my hypothesis. This is, this is my, you know, lit review, this is my hypothesis. This is our approach to the scientific study. This is what we're going to study. Let's see if it, you know, flies. We got in there, we built the whole thing, we ran the test, and we went, Holy crap, it worked.
Lily Jones 26:15
Amazing.
Emily Cadiz 26:19
Like, really worked it. Mind you, it had holes. Like, everything has holes. We got to go back and redo a bunch of stuff. But I was like, oh my god.
Lily Jones 26:27
Yeah, that's so great. And I love hearing about the process too, because I think sometimes, even when we do have experience in certain areas, and even when we have expertise, and even when we have great ideas, it's always, in some ways, an experiment to you know of being like, all right? Well, how does this work? And how does it work now, and how does it work in this context? And so I appreciate hearing about how it was an experiment and how you learned from doing it. And I'd love to hear a little bit more now that you're in the phase of like, how do you sell this thing? A lot of our audience, our teachers, who have an idea of something they might want to test or grow or start a business or do something outside of the classroom? Yeah. And I know, I mean, I have the same experience of being like, Oh, I have to sell things now that isn't just like reading or doing math, you know? It's a whole new world. And so I'd love to hear a little about your experience changing gears in that way, or adding this new set of skills? And any advice you have for teachers out there?
Emily Cadiz 27:26
Well, yeah, so it's not a skill that you're going to master, I think in your lifetime. First of all, let's start with that. And you don't need to. That's not your job, straight up. I mean, we have really been like frogs and pots of boiling water. To say that you have to actually be experts in all of these different fields, because there is no way to get help when you are you were in a classroom, you are like, you know, here's your budget of $100 here's some cardboard, some duct tape. Go get them. That's it. Yeah, exactly. So you naturally think I'm going to solve everything. I'm going to solve it. Solve it, solve it, solve it, solve it, solve it, right? And at some point things become big enough where you go that's actually not your job. Your job is to listen, be a good listener. Which teachers are not good at. You have to be bad at something again, like mediocre at best, and be okay with that. You have to be open to critical feedback, which can be hard when you have come into something you're like, Oh, I'm an expert in this field, and you are not going to be an expert in every field. You're going to be given some, you know, sometimes some harsh, critical feedback. So you have to be open to those things. That's going to be like, like number one and number two. You're going to have to shift your paradigm, that your time is actually worth a lot, that it's not just something we give away for free anymore, that everyone else and every other industry understood. Attorneys are renowned for this. They're like, I don't sell widgets. I sell my time. If we could think like that, we would be great, but it's really hard to adjust that thinking in your brain that your time is incredibly valuable because our time is often stretched so thin as educators, and we're like, we can cram it all in, right? And it just doesn't ever work. It falls apart. So I would say, if you're, if you're looking at starting a company, I would say, look at those soft skills first and then and then after that. I would say, find people that you can work with, that you trust. You know there's a person who told me, I would say, about two years ago, now, if you cannot trust the people that you're working with, then there's no reason to work with them. One. We are also, as educators, forced to work with people from all walks of life, and we kind of suppress our guts to go, like, Oh, our guts are telling us that this is not somebody that I would trust, but you do it anyways, because that's what you have to do. And so getting into that, like, get, I should say, getting out of that frame of mind is really, really hard. And then I think another quote that I heard this week is Brene Brown saying, below the line of fear. So when you're running something and it's costing money and there's always a chance that it's going to fail, you have to be operating above the line of fear. You have to not let it dictate you. It can, it can, it can be there, but it can't be in the driver's seat. When you're below the line of fear, you're either that victim, you're that villain, or you're the hero, and you can't describe yourself as any one of those things. But if you can get above the line of fear, and you can say, okay, how can we didn't work out the way I wanted it to, I need to go back to square one. I need to look at my own communication style, or the communication style of the team members that I have. Where did we fail? How do we do this better? If you stay above the line of fear, I think that you have a better shot of doing this. But if you're below the line of fear, you are going to struggle far, far more than you need to. You will be here often. You just have to say, Okay, I think this is where I'm at. I gotta get above it.
Lily Jones 31:25
So powerful. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that it's interesting how much of this is in our brains, like it's how we view things, it's how we frame struggle, it's how we frame fear. And I appreciate how you said, like, yeah, you might be going into it as an expert in some ways, but then you're coming in and being like, mediocre at best as something else. And I think that really messes with us, right? Like, as grown ups, like, I work with teachers who are trying new things, right? And they feel really confident as teachers, and then they try something new, and they don't feel confident in that. And I think it's actually a really super valuable experience to be a grown up who felt competent in something, going into something and feeling not so competent in another area. I mean, I think it's just so powerful, you know, seeing how we learn and move through that, but I also understand that it's incredibly hard, and so I think recognizing is so important. Because if you go in and you're like, Well, why does this feel so hard? You know, I'm starting an education business. I'm an educator, I'm an expert at this. So recognizing, like I'm trying something new, and it's not supposed to be easy. I'm not supposed to be an expert at it right away, can be really helpful.
Emily Cadiz 32:37
Oh yeah, no. And I did, you know, I have a couple of really good mentors, and one of them, I don't reach out to very often. I'll only reach out, like once every couple months to say, Okay, I gotta check in. I gotta, I gotta figure out where I'm at. And I don't know why this guy meets with me, but God bless him. His name is Peter Cohen, and he was very, very successful in the field of educational technology. Just like, look him up. He's fantastic. And the first time I met with him, and I was like, holy cow, how do you know all of this? How do you know all of this? Where do these pearls of wisdom come from? And he straight up. He was like, 30 years of non stop failure. What? What What are you talking about? Dude, that's not like, not what I was expecting coming out of it. Because from the outside, there is nothing but success that you see, and someone who's comfortable enough to say, no, it's been a sequence and a series and a non stop barrage of problems that need to be solved. And then you go back to like, you know, Einstein saying it isn't about whether you can solve the problem. It's about whether you can sit with the problem long enough to get it solved right. It's not have to do it. So all these things actually, when you start shifting your life and doing things that make you this lifelong learner, what that means is that you're going to have a life full of non stop failures, and that it's your it's your job to take those opportunities to learn from them, and that's really what this has been. And so I can't imagine it being ever something that that I would look back on, even if nothing came of it and said, This is a complete failure. I only look back on it and say, Wow. I mean, what a gift it was to get injured and to find this new path, and to say, there's something else that I can learn, and there's something I can learn every single day, and that type of a gift doesn't come along very often.
Lily Jones 34:36
And how inspiring that you took that moment and created something that could be so powerful for so many people.
Emily Cadiz 34:41
And I, I would like to say I did not know I was doing that at the time. I was just, this is awful, but yeah, surviving something like that alone is a gift.
Lily Jones 34:52
So absolutely and seeing what made a difference for you and exploring, can this make a difference for other people? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so Emily, I so appreciate hearing about your story and learning more about Prelude early learning. Can you tell folks where they can connect with you?
Emily Cadiz 35:07
Yeah, you can. You can email me at Emily at Prelude early learning.com you can go to support info, hello, all of the beginning parts of that and Prelude early learning.com you can go to our website, and there's plenty of links to getting more information there as well. So that's Prelude early learning.com.
Lily Jones 35:28
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Emily.
Emily Cadiz 35:29
Thank you. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai