Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

Kids put on a hot show

Posted on August 6, 2009 by Staff

Performance of Pinpon at the Mundo Pequeño School graduation ceremony. From left to right, Ori Moore, Mena Boggs, Caroline Allen, Jacob Kirshner, Anjali Kshirsagar, Ian O’Fallon, Alexander Kwok and Lillian Harper. Photo by Valarie Schwartz.By Valarie Schwartz

The outdoor conditions fluctuated between steamy and stifling while parents and guests waited unaware through several delay-producing calamities before the children processed onto the stage erected on the brick patio.

This was the 2009 Mundo Pequeño Early Childhood Bilingual School graduation ceremony, during which children from ages 2 to 5 performed. Even before the delayed start, the list of 25 songs and poems (picked by the children) may have daunted some audience members. But the children proved so entertaining, the time quickly passed as they showed time and again how very much they had learned at such tender ages.

They performed in English, Spanish, French, Chinese and International Sign Language, each stepping to the front of the platform when taking the lead (which they volunteered to do), each child providing expressions that dissolved the crowd of adults into elated giggles.

Children at this age are just precious as well as being so very retentive, a fact that founding school director Claudia McLaughlin knows very well.

“We are all products of our parents,” McLaughlin said as she faced the audience at the onset. For the past few months, she has pushed herself harder than usual while battling Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

“I felt like I was dying,” she said as she shared her darkest moments, during which she ruminated on her parents. “My parents put a lot of education into me and told me I could do whatever I wanted to do.”

When she became an orphan and political refugee, she remembered their words and used her education to open the school in Chapel Hill, which grew from a home daycare started 25 years ago in one home in the Greenwood neighborhood to the hiring of other foreign-born women as teachers working from two adjacent houses, imparting their languages and other knowledge to children who ranged from a month old to almost 6 years.

Sean and Devon Allen were presumably attending their last graduation at Mundo Pequeno, as their second daughter, Caroline, was graduating into kindergarten. Sean sat down with a bouquet of flowers to give his youngest child.

“I can’t believe she’s growing up,” he said with a slight crack in his voice. When they moved here from Texas five years ago, Caroline was 11 months and her sister Maddie was 3.

“We chose this school because it was multilingual, had a five-star rating and met our other criteria,” Devon said.

While waiting for the show to begin, some of the many chickens and a rooster in a pen behind the stage put on a little performance of their own, creating a good deal of racket. Devon smiled and said, “Where else can you have a rooster, a goat, multi-languages and organic food for your children?” Not to mention rabbits, ducks and yoga.

Maybe it was nerves, but from over 300 photos taken during the program it was apparent that the younger the child, the fewer the smiles, with some never caught smiling.

Still, each of the children stayed on the stage for 45 minutes without crying in front of adults. When the graduates received their diplomas, each produced award-winning smiles, having demonstrated that they’ve learned far more than how to turn their lips upward.

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme