At our Reggio Inspired setting, we focus on three main areas;
1) The environment as the third teacher
2) Immersion
3) Documentation
This is to ensure we are scaffolding children’s learning and helping them to thrive and be the best they can be; learning and embedding skills for life such as critical thinking, problem-solving and reasoning, resilience, self-confidence and self-awareness. This is particularly evident in our early years’ settings but runs throughout the school within our enquiry based national curriculum.
1) The environment as the 3rd teacher
The quality of the environment plays an active role in how children play and learn. Building, organisations, resources; all are so important in developing learning that it can be seen as having a 3rd teacher in the room. Welcoming, tidy, practical, calm with open ended resources to encourage curiosity, creativity and communication (Tablecloths, vases, flowers). Every space has a purpose both indoors and out. Spaces where children can be creative, make choices explore and investigate, think and reflect, communicate and be challenged. Spaces have features such as visibility (light, airy) flexibility (moveable furniture/resources), light (OHP/Light tables/dimmer switches drawing children to look closer) and shadow, reflection (mirrors, infinity boxes to promote self awareness and self discovery, curiosity, investigation, seeing things from different perspectives), multi-sensory (variety of textures, colour, sound, smell (plants, potpourri) – neutral colours to allow displays and resources to stand out better.
2) Immersion
Immersion in our settings is all about depth rather than breadth with open ended resources, spending more time to investigate and explore, looking at things from different angles and perspectives with different tools and media, light and shadows, children using their hundred languages on a child led long term project instead of reading/writing alone. The focus is on the learning journey rather than the outcome. When children are immersed and have the opportunity to play with their ideas in different situations and with a variety of resources they discover new connections and come to a new and better understanding and ways of doing things. With adult support, this process enhances ability to think critically, ask questions, creativity emerges as they become absorbed in exploring and investigating. This leads to mastery of the area which they are learning about and the skills they are using.
3)Documentation
The quality of how we document children’s learning is very important in the Reggio Inspired setting. Traditionally we have tended to display and assess the end product not the learning process. Schools /nurseries are increasingly documenting the learning process (acquiring knowledge, organising and processing it, researching, adult intervention etc) as this, the learning journey, is more important than the finished product. Documentation and recording observations of how children think and displaying these remind children, staff and parents of the learning process and the conversations and discussions which helped them.
If you would like to see any of the above in action, please contact us to arrange a visit.
