 Language is such a fundamental part of early childhood and the development of language and hearing language. It's really a building block for social and cognitive development. If you measure children's vocabulary when they get to kindergarten, so how many words they know, it's super predictive of like their reading skills later on in fourth grade, for example. And we have these huge achievement gaps by socioeconomic status in reading. That's a problem because it means that as a society we're not giving all children an equal footing to start with as they're coming into public schooling. I was really excited to see the LSX announcement when it came out. The brief was we want to cross-collaborate with people and combine art forms and with science. I was like, that's brilliant! Brilliant! This is what I want to do. This is what I'm interested in and how exciting when it be to work with people from different worlds, different fields to make the work that I'm doing even even more interesting and have more of a background to it and be more accessible. I was really drawn to areas of research surrounding poverty in how it impacts children. That tied directly to this big project I've been working on in the criminal justice system and one of the scientists in the group Meredith, her work was all about the word gap. So the word gap is the fact that children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are exposed to many more words during early childhood than children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds basically at home. But the important piece of it that we know now is that it's not so much the gap in quantity that matters but it's the gap in quality so having those sort of really high quality conversations with the children is what we're finding is more important. To the point that early childhood can really make a difference for a person throughout their whole life, one of the things that we try to emphasize around policies is also that yes that's the case but it needs to be something that's a sustained investment and not equivalent to an inoculation that you know we need to have strong transitions into primary school as well then and continued opportunities for all children. This may sound cheesy but it really was a true collaborative idea. I don't know at which point it came up but as soon as it did we all kind of jumped on it we're like someone might have said let's make a PSA let's oh we could do that animation oh I could write the script or like we all kind of jumped to it and saw that this is an idea we can action well with our contacts and we really believed in it and I think that was the key thing we believed in the message we knew we could communicate it across and we knew we could make something beautiful. It's very early on in the brainstorming of the animation we thought what better way to get this across by having a child read it. We wanted it to feel very much child-centered so that the voice was coming from the child of you know talk with me that's all you need to do let's have a chat together let's hang out and rather than being told I think there's a lot of sometimes parents feel that they're being lectured to or they're being told to do this in order to get a healthy child you should be doing this and we really wanted to avoid that we wanted to say look it's quite you know it should be enjoyable it's an it's a natural thing. When we envisaged how it would look we did have some initial ideas we wanted something quite simplistic but the benefit of working in this field already is I have a few animators that I've worked with before who I trust I don't really trust them to produce really visually stunning pieces I trust them to take the concept of the science I'm working with and translate it into the best idea as possible and then we all love the visuals that came back and we ran with it. And then my daughter Sia was the voice in the piece which is actually really lovely and it was done as a bit of a let's just see how this sounds and everyone seemed to like her voice which was really nice for her and it's been brilliant for her to see it all come together as well. One thing I've learned just through doing small research studies parents who do know more about child development and about you know what kids are capable and about interacting with children do then ultimately sort of interact with them in ways that promote learning so there is something very much to be said for just getting information out there in an accessible way so that if parents want to access it they can. I'm really grateful for the fellowship and the opportunity to engage with this incredible group of people. It's just been a really great experience for me personally to work with such a diverse group of people and learn a lot about different industries I mean I still have a lot to learn but it's been a it's been a great experience for sure. Even talk, I hear what you're seeing and it's helping my brain. It's actually lighting up in so many different places all at once. What's really amazing is that there's a way to make my brain go even more and we can all do it. It's very simple and lots of fun. Like sharing. It's all about taking turns and talking about lots of little things or even big things. But wait, or how do flowers go? You can also talk to the source? Or can you see women when you sing and we try it? How was your day today? Talk with me.