Meet Heather
Heather Malley is the founder and director of Caterpillar Cottage Preschool, an author, and a fierce advocate of empathy and active listening.
Heather has been working in the field of early education and child development for over 25 years. She began her career as a Montessori preschool teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area, first as an assistant, and eventually as a lead teacher at Keystone Montessori. Her love for the field eventually led to eight years of work as a researcher and program evaluator, identifying quality early education programs and helping early education programs to improve; she worked as a researcher at UCLA’s Center for Improving Child Care Quality and as an early childhood program evaluator at Child Care Resource Center. She has a B.A. in Psychology with an emphasis in Research Methods from Mills College and earned her Montessori Teaching Credential in her early years of teaching. In 2010, with great joy Heather opened her own program, Caterpillar Cottage Preschool, offering the kind of quality preschool program that supports the development of the whole child.
In addition to writing and her work at Caterpillar, Heather provides mentoring for college students and teachers majoring in Child Development, as well as education for parents who seek to learn more about supportive parenting.
Heather’s Blog
Heather’s Books
A place for a young child's thoughts and stories. Available in soft paperback and hard cover. Parents or teachers scribe for a child and they can add pictures.
A story about not knowing what will come in the new school year and the good things that we still get to experience.
A story for children about feelings during the pandemic. Children are supported with books that help them understand feelings.
No Para Siempre Sino Por El Momento: Una historia de sentimientos durante la pandemia - Spanish version of Not Forever But For Now.
“Humans are born to create; most teaching strategies ignore that and risk disempowering the human spirit.”
-Heather Malley, Director