Meet a Mama: Reggio Emilia in the home
Meet Brittany! She is an early childhood educator at a blended Montessori/Reggio Emilia based preschool. Brittany earned her Bachelor’s degree in elementary education and her Master of Arts in teaching with specific focus on preschool to 3rd grade. She is passionate about being a child advocate and fostering their natural curiosity and wonder and is particularly interested in furthering the awareness of the play-based Reggio Emilia approach to education and educating others on how to follow the lead of the child through an emergent curriculum. Brittany currently lives in Greenville, South Carolina with her husband, 2-year-old son, and 2 dogs.
You can find Brittany on Instagram and Facebook, sharing her parenting journey and how she wonders, explores and learns with her son. Brittany is a delight and so easy to talk to with a wealth of knowledge and I have loved getting to know her and her approach to parenting.
Can you tell us a little about yourself, your family and about where you live?
Hi! I’m Brittany—wife, Mom to a very sweet and active 2-year-old little boy and preschool teacher to 3- and 4-year olds. We currently live in Greenville, SC. In my spare time you can find me most often playing outside with my son or reading.
How did you first become interested in the Reggio Emilia approach and what is your background with this approach?
While studying to get my master’s degree, I read a book called Working in the Reggio Way by Julianne Wurm. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more in-depth about the Reggio Emilia philosophy to education. It is more of a textbook for formal educators, but I believe all parents are educators! So, it would be beneficial to read as a parent if you really want to know all about the Reggio way of doing things. I never knew much about the Reggio Emilia approach prior to that but when I read it, I found myself audibly saying “Yes! Exactly!” with so many things. I never realized that this approach to early childhood education was what I believed all along.
What drew me in the most was how the Reggio Emilia philosophy views the child as fully capable, a whole person who is competent, naturally curious and creative and able to direct their own learning. Then their role of the teacher and parents as co-learners and co-researchers with the students.
Fast forward 3 years later, I began teaching at a Reggio Emilia based school and have been researching and implementing this approach in our school for the last two years. I also help train new teachers we have with how to implement the Reggio Emilia approach in the classroom. Now that I’m a parent I find myself further studying and implementing the Reggio approach at home as well.
For you, what is the Reggio Emilia approach?
Relationships. At the heart of Reggio Emilia’s guiding principles is relationship. Developing a relationship of respect for the child, the environment, the process of learning, the community. Everything is interconnected and the relationship behind those principals is the driving force to make learning meaningful.
With the Reggio Emilia philosophy, children lead their own learning by being allowed to pursue topics of interest. Educators and parents and the community work together to guide them and help them explore deeper using materials in the environment (home or school, outside) and through project work. This idea of learning being relational and interconnected is what I love most about the Reggio philosophy. It’s the relationship between child, teacher, parents, and environment that ignite learning, create wonder, and where you find joy in the process of learning. This is the recipe for creating life-long lovers of learning.
As a parent, what 3 key principles do you think define the Reggio Emilia approach at home?
Child-led and project learning
Giving children the freedom to follow and develop their own interests usually through a multi-sensory, interdisciplinary approach. Naturally through following a child’s interest and focusing on project work, a wide variety of subjects is covered.
Project work is where children can research and explore their interests in a variety of ways and express their learning in whatever way they want. These projects may last a day, a week, a month, or a whole year depending on how deep their interests are. Often times I find children will start with one interest and upon further research become interested in another topic related to what we’ve been talking about. So, then we add on to the first project and what started as a simple question about bugs turns into a year-long project about habitats. What might start as one smaller project often as the children construct their own knowledge, naturally gets more and more complex and we cover so many concepts within one project. Also, with the Reggio Emilia approach, project work might not always end in a tangible product, it’s all about the process. Through project work, children are able to explore a topic of interest from many angles. They can read about it, draw about it, build it, write about it, paint. This provides children numerous ways to learn a single topic and express themselves.
Implementing project work at home would look a little something like this:
You notice while playing, your child has an interest in construction lately.
You provide various materials for them to build with to expand this interest.
You read books about construction and maybe even drive or walk by a construction site to watch builders at work.
Through building and learning about construction, your child shows interests in building “TALL towers.” You ask them “how can we see how tall it is?” “Are you bigger or smaller than the tower?” For toddlers this is mostly just helping them form the vocabulary and you talking through the thought process. For older pre-schoolers they are able to have more of a discussion and come up with various tools on their own to measure the tower. Measuring the towers with different tools (measure using their body, measure by counting the blocks, measure using a ruler) allows for beginning math skills to be introduced in a hands-on natural way through play.
You continue to provide new ways to build things with clay or play dough, popsicle sticks, cardboard and other loose parts and watch and listen to see what questions or opportunities to extend their learning occur.
Maybe their interest in towers, encourages researching about real life towers in cities. Through looking at different towers they discover how buildings are made up of different shapes which brings up a discussion about shapes.
Which then creates an interest in drawing or using shapes to construct buildings.
You keep following their interests and questioning as it happens. Sometimes it might have an end goal or final product that is produced but most of the time it’s continuous never linear and an end product isn’t the goal. When academics are discovered as a natural result of playing and researching, the interest and joy for learning will always be there.
The environment is the “third teacher”
The environment with the Reggio Emilia approach is very important. In Reggio Emilia they call it the “third teacher.” The first teacher is the parent, the second the classroom teacher and the third the environment. In a Reggio inspired space everything is well thought out and planned to reflect the Reggio view of the child of being respected, creative, fully capable and to ignite children’s natural wonder and desire to explore. The environment should support the children so they can explore interest with little adult interaction and direction.
Creating a “third teacher” at home:
Look around your home
Does it promote independence? Are things easily accessible to your child to explore on their own?
Do you have materials of various textures and uses (fabrics, music instruments, loose parts) that invite children to explore?
Are there mirrors, art and furniture at their eye level?
Does your environment spark their curiosity?
Ways to create a Reggio inspired environment in your home:
Provide open ended toys and loose parts for children to explore freely that are accessible to them whenever they want.
Have areas of your house set up in a way the promotes independence. (Step stools, mirrors on their level, art and pictures on their level, child-sized furniture)
Change up your environment as children’s interests change
Use natural light and plants to create wonder and ambience. Hanging prisms are my favourite! Having prisms available for children to hold and explore at their level is also so much fun.
Provide items in various parts of your house that encourage and inspire children to create and express themselves. (A small notepad and crayon with a play kitchen, a place where art items are always available for them to use whenever, chalkboard or whiteboard at their level on your wall, spaces for dancing or building, spaces to create music.)
Educators are co-researchers with children
Instead of the traditional sense of imparting knowledge to your student or child, educators participate in their play and learning as a co-researcher. You are there simply to be a resource to them along the way. Helping them make connections and develop relationships with the world around them.
It takes practice to just watch without trying to impart knowledge to children because it’s so different than the traditional view of educators and parents being the source of knowledge, and children being empty vessels to be filled. Instead, with the Reggio approach, children are viewed to be completely capable. They are able to direct their own learning through their natural curiosity and wonder, and learn through making discoveries, experiences, relationships and their own projects. Educators and parents are there to help guide them in that process. This is my favourite part (I feel like I say that about all of Reggio)! Seeing things through our children’s eyes, discovering and exploring together as if it’s our first time seeing and learning these things too brings so much joy. It makes us adults pause and see the world with wonder, rediscover our own childlike spirit and learn things maybe we didn’t know before.
When parents first find Reggio Emilia, it could be seen as overwhelming if they could only do one thing what would it be?
Read the poem, “The 100 Languages.” This explains the Reggio Emilia view of the child perfectly. It’s short, but so powerful in helping shift our mindsets and views of educating children. There’s 100 hundred ways children express themselves. 100 ways children learn. 100 ways children process things. Respecting those 100 ways, encouraging a multi-sensory approach to their learning and development and allowing them to learn in however way fits them best. Helping them to discover their extraordinary potentials in 100 ways (and more).
Also, I believe it helps to understand that the Reggio approach isn’t a specific curriculum. It’s guiding principles. There isn’t a specific way that you present materials or lessons or specific standards that have to be met on a certain time table. To some teachers, it is hard to let go of that planner type instincts but to parents who are a little overwhelmed with curriculums or how to teach at home, I think it’s freeing to know there’s not a right or wrong way to do things as long as you are using the Reggio principals as a guide.
How can the Reggio Emilia principles help children learn?
Through the Reggio Emilia principles children are valued and respected as fully capable and natural researchers who are innately driven to explore and desire knowledge. This approach enables children to go into deeper levels of thinking and are able to maintain interest and focus on learning because of following their interests. The value the Reggio Emilia principles put on relationships within learning set children up to find joy in the process of learning and encourages life-long learners.
