Create

In the Reggio Emilia approach, children are encouraged to create things.  Students learn by interacting with their environment and creative materials provided by the teacher.  In this model children need to have opportunities and materials to express themselves.  Children learn by exploring, touching, moving, listening, hearing, seeing, and experimenting.

The Reggio Community

The Reggio community consists of the children, the teacher, and the parents. The relationships of the people in the community are crucial in order for the Reggio Approach to work successfully. When everyone talks they find new ways of educating the children in the best possible way. They work together to build a culture that respects their adolescence as being a time they can explore, create, and be happy. The Riggio Approach says that it is the parents right to be actively involved with the decisions and development of their children’s education. 

Emergent Curriculum

The Reggio Emilia approach uses an emergent curriculum.  This means that the curriculum builds upon things the children are interested in.  Teachers plan activities and projects that coincide with the students' interests.
In Reggio Emilia classrooms children are very active in their education. Students do a lot of project work.  The students learn how to investigate, and carry out projects based on things that appeal to them.

Watch this video to learn more! http://vimeo.com/14486386

The Classroom

How the classroom is set up is very crucial. The environment is so important that it has often been referred to as the "third teacher". The layout of the classroom can encourage the children to learn by being able to interact with the space around them. The children also need to be able to feel comfortable and safe when they are in the class. Riggio classrooms are filled with a lot of creative items such as clay, pain, and writing implements. Children use these materials to represent the concepts in a hands-on learning experience. In the book Bringing Reggio Emilie Home, Louise Cadwell says it best when she says:

"The importance of the environment lies in the belief that children can best create meaning and make sense of their world through environments which support complex, varied, sustained, and changing relationships between people, the world of experience, ideas and the many ways of expressing ideas."

The Hundred Languages

The Hundred Languages was a poem written by Loris Malaguzzi. He expresses his interpretation of how children learn and see the world through this poem. He also talks about how others are teaching children wrong because that's not how children grow and develop.

The Beginning

The Reggio Approach was first founded in Reggio Emilia, a small city in northern Italy, by Loris Malaguzzi and the parents of Reggio Emilia. The approach was started shortly after World War Two because they wanted to provide child care for their young children, and also women needed a way to return back to the workforce. The Reggio preschool was a parent run school. Loris Malaguzzi was an elementary school teacher who not only founded the Reggio Approach, but also wrote The Hundred Languages of Children poem.