Behind the Scenes: Developing a Reggio Preschool

The week before last, while K was away with her friends, I got to start designing in earnest the curriculum for the farm preschool cooperative. Heather, K’s mom, came up with 3 core areas of focus for the curriculum outlining what she wanted the kids in her program to learn and emailed it to me. I had previously been working on a document spelling out the features of the Reggio Approach and how to set up a program that embodied this philosophy. While this is bound to be a helpful in training teachers and parents, I needed to understand what Heather wanted out of this program before I could really get down into the details of curriculum design. Her outline gave me exactly what I needed and the past two weeks have left me exploding with inspiration and excitement. So this week I’ve decided to let you in on what’s been keeping me busy here on the farm when I am not with K. Aside from all the crafting that is. 

Painting alphabet stones, capital letters on one side and lower-case on the other, K loves picking a stone and listing off words that start with the sound her chosen letter makes. Knowing I made them invites her to think about what she could make too.

Curriculum design is my favorite part of working in education. I love it. Researching and developing interesting and engaging learning materials, contemplating the various facets of child development and figuring out how to best support student growth is what puts me in my element, as Ken Robinson would say. I could (and often do) spend hours and hours on Pinterest and Google stocking up on ideas for designing quality classrooms that promote powerful and enjoyable learning experiences for both students and teachers. I love reading articles and books on the subject and talking about it with anyone who will listen. This week, while Heather and K have family in town, I get the chance to pull my knowledge and experience together and build a program from the ground up. Now that the foundation work is done, fleshing out the philosophy, mission statement, and approach, and identifying the core focus areas upon which the curriculum will build, I get dive into the nuts and bolts of how to actually support each child’s development in the areas Heather identified.

Now, when I say that I am designing a curriculum, I mean not that I am mapping out every learning experience, experiment, and lesson that these kids will take part in throughout their many days at school. Rather, I mean that I am researching and pulling together resources to design a well-rounded classroom environment that offers students opportunities to develop their skills in the areas that interest them most. In a Reggio-Inspired program, the classrooms themselves are a crucial teaching tool, filled with engaging materials and tools to explore them with so that no matter where each student's curiosity takes him/her a valuable learning experience is bound to take place. So what I am doing is taking the concepts within each of the three core focus areas Heather outlined and finding as many materials and resources as possible that will help support learning and growth in these ares. Then once the classroom is complete, students will have the chance to explore their environment and engage with the materials and activities that speak them as they are inspired to do so. While this is happening, the Reggio teacher observes and collaborates with students and continues to develop new ways to compliment each student's learning by bringing in new resources and activities to build on their existing knowledge and skills. 

Notice all the different learning stations, the purposeful design and careful organization, and the supportive and welcoming atmosphere of this space that just begs to be explored at Bear Park preschool in New Zealand

Each program is unique because the core areas of focus depend on the values of the community and each classroom is designed with it's particular inhabitants in mind. Here I will share the backbone of the curriculum I am designing here on the farm with Heather. She chose three areas of focus that she thought were most important and together we identified the core concepts within these three. The core focus areas are not the lessons the kids will learn, but more like the context or frame in which learning opportunities are presented. Always, however, it is the children who create their own educational experiences, we teachers and administrators simply cultivate a community and classroom through which to support each students' individual learning style and educational pursuits. For the farm preschool cooperative, this is how the curriculum is beginning to take shape:

The first core curriculum focus is on Social & Personal Responsibility. This covers interpersonal skills, mindfulness, self-awareness, empathy and altruism, civic engagement, community service, self-care and caring for others, and other social and emotional skills. Many schools pay very little attention to development in these areas, either valuing it less than the more “academic” skills or assuming that it is the parents’ job to instill values in their children. First of all, there are tons of academic fields devoted to studying these topics and tons of studies demonstrating the importance of developing social and emotional skills from the very beginning of childhood. Second, kids spend almost as much time (sometimes more) with teachers and peers than they do with their parents, especially with so many single parents working extra just to get the bills paid. It is more important than ever for schools to teach these things. To help organize ideas on how to address this core focus of the curriculum and teach the concepts listed above, I have created a new board on Pinterest called, CoreCurriculum: Social & Personal Responsibility. Check it out for inspiration and resources on incorporating social and emotional development in the classroom.

To satisfy her desire to make the world a better place, Miss Rumphius planted flowers all over her neighborhood, this story leads to beautiful and inspiring conversations of how each one of us can help make the world a better place.

 The second core focus is on Agriculture & Sustainability. Being situated on a farm in an agricultural community, it made sense to use agriculture as a means of gathering knowledge about the world and how it works. As far as sustainability goes, Heather and I both recognize that the children of the next generations are not going to be able to rely on the fossil fuels that supported our generation. By helping these kids see our growing world through a lens of sustainability, we aim to prepare them for the future they are likely to inherit. To protect our earth and it’s resources, it is never too early for kids to begin seeking out more creative and sustainable sources of energy and development, not to mention the many intangible rewards of leading a more sustainable lifestyle. Topics making up the bulk of this core focus include the food cycle, the healing power and nutritional benefits of food, ecology, biomimicry, building and design, recycling, self-sufficiency skills, problem-solving, natural and environmental sciences, cooking, harnessing the earth’s natural resources, living in harmony with rather than in opposition to the plant and animal species, and many more. Resources and inspiration for integrating these concepts into the curriculum can be found on my new Pinterest board called Core Curriculum: Agriculture& Sustainability. It is our hope that looking at the world from this perspective will help these kids be prepared to successfully tackle the challenges that lie in wait.

I showed her the new eggplant and now every day K wants to go out to the garden and check its growth. I shared my interest with her, knowing her love of food, her interest is piqued. Now we have countless opportunities to learn about how plants grow, why we cultivate our garden, all the while deepening her respect for the earth that feeds us, and the cycle of life.

The third and final core focus for the farm preschool cooperative is Creativity & the Arts. Problem-solving, innovation, and critical thinking are all highly related to creativity and unfortunately in most public schools, the arts are the first programs to be cut. Art, be it painting, sculpting, dance, interior design, architecture, cake decorating, flower arranging, scrap booking, landscaping, poetry and song writing, acting, and everything else, is a way for people to creatively express their ideas, experiences, and emotions. Art is an engaging and enjoyable way for students to explore every academic inquiry and topic out there. How better to learn the human skeletal structure than to accurately draw or sculpt it, or understand the concepts of geometry by drawing and designing a tree-house and then actually building it? The arts invite students to engage in the creative process, teaching them new ways of thinking and to see the world from multiple perspectives. Art allows students to develop a number of skills and is often the saving grace for many students who struggle to learn via lecture and instruction and would otherwise flounder in traditional programs. For ideas on how to facilitate creativity and the arts in the classroom, check out my new Pinterest board, Core Curriculum: Creativity & the Arts.

Blocks of all shapes and sizes are an excellent way for kids to develop creativity and put their imaginations to work. Not only are the planning and design beneficial and stretch their artistic muscles, but the play that resulting from their creations allows children to try on different roles and work through problems as they speak and act for the characters in their games.

You probably noticed that there are a lot of traditional academic subjects missing from this curriculum. They are there, just not in the way most of us are used to. Rather than separating subjects like history, literacy, math, and others, our curriculum addresses these subjects through the lens of the three core focus areas. For example, exploration of the food we eat lends itself perfectly to talking about the social and cultural aspects of culinary traditions. As students learn to prepare different foods together, they will find out where different kinds of foods grow, how other cultures cook, why they eat the food they do, what the terrain is like, why communities settled where they did, etc. The subjects not listed directly in the core areas are addressed within the context of projects that are born from the core concepts. This is how learning happens in emergent and project-based classrooms, through interdisciplinary projects collaboratively designed between students and teachers that emerge organically from the interests and questions of the students themselves.

This is how learning happens outside of school, and in Reggio-Inspired programs, this is also how it happens within schools. This is why I love the Reggio Approach; learning is synonymous with play, excitement, and adventure, not tests, lectures and boredom. Students follow their innate intellectual curiosities while teachers ask them about their ideas, theories, and hypotheses. Teachers listen to their students and support their interests and pull other students in who have complimentary interests and skills to collaborate as a group to deepen and broaden everyone’s understanding of the concepts being explored. All topics become mysteries that need solving and each child gets the chance to investigate those they are most drawn to alongside peers who are all doing the same. Teachers, in these self-directed classrooms, weave their way between individuals and groups observing, listening, posing new questions and offering different perspectives, joining in their efforts, and continually seek out new ideas to share with their kids. Not only this, but teachers are allowed to be students themselves, not the sole proprietors of information. Alongside their students these teachers pursue the topics that most interest them, modeling how to learn and sharing their enthusiasm with curious students. Together, in a community of equals joined by their desire to learn, knowledge is constructed and celebrated.