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Hung up on criss-cross applesauce?

Date: June 23rd, 2016
By: Polly Bath

Polly Bath: If you’re teaching little kids, don’t get all bogged down by criss cross applesauce.

All the high school teachers in here, go to your classroom tomorrow morning and say, “OK, everybody. We are going to stop. Stop. Pull the chairs, everybody criss cross applesauce.”

They’re all going to go into post traumatic stress disorder. They’re going to go, “No, I was in therapy for that until middle school. Because when I was four and five, all I heard was, ‘Criss cross applesauce, criss cross applesauce.’ I hate apple sauce. It’s traumatizing to even look at it in the grocery store.”

Don’t get hung up on criss cross applesauce. You know why? It’s hard to sit that way! Think about yourself. Can you sit cross legged on the floor for an extended amount of time and hold your body up and attend? No!

All the physical people in the world, physical fitness and OTs, will tell you that your whole core is your weakest part of your body when you were a little kid, and the heaviest part of your body is your head. Now, you have a bunch of little kids sitting there like this and eventually their heads go down.

Criss cross…OK. I’m trying so hard to sit in the applesauce position, but the rest of me is shut down.