Reggio Emilia

Our environments have a great influence on how we feel and behave and where we focus our energy. If we are spending the waking hours of our lives in disorganized, unattractive places, this climate will affect us greatly. Living many waking hours in stressful, disorganized, or dirty spaces can create stress and disharmony. Not only does it influence the children but the staff as well.

Today we are talking about Reggio Emilia philosophy.

Within the Reggio Emilia schools, great attention is given to the look and feel of the classroom. Environment is considered the "third teacher." Teachers carefully organize space for small and large group projects and small intimate spaces for one, two or three children. Documentation of children's work, plants, and collections that children have made from former outings are displayed both at the children's and adult eye level. Common space available to all children in the school includes dramatic play areas and worktables for children from different classrooms to come together.

Teacher Role:

• to organize the classroom and materials to be aesthetically pleasing
• to organize materials to help children make thoughtful decisions about the media
• to co-explore the learning experience with the children
• to provoke ideas, problem solving, and conflict
• to take ideas from the children and return them for further exploration
• to document children's progress: visual, videotape, tape recording, portfolios
• to help children see the connections in learning and experiences
• to help children express their knowledge through representational work
• to form a "collective" among other teachers and parents
• to have a dialogue about the projects with parents and other teachers
• to foster the connection between home, school and community

Media:

• explore first: what is this material, what does it do, before what can I do with the material
• should have variation in color, texture, pattern: help children "see" the colors, tones, hues; help children "feel" the texture, the similarities and differences
• should be presented in an artistic manner--it too should be aesthetically pleasing to look at--it should invite you to touch, admire, inspire
• should be revisited throughout many projects to help children see the possibilities

Projects:

• can be introduced by teachers knowing what is of interest to children: shadows, puddles, tall buildings, construction sites, nature, etc.
• can emerge from children's ideas and/or interests
• can be provoked by teachers
• should be long enough to develop over time, to discuss new ideas, to negotiate over, to induce conflicts, to revisit, to see progress, to see movement of ideas
• should be concrete, personal from real experiences, important to children, should be "large" enough for diversity of ideas and rich in interpretive/representational expression

Classroom Closet Clean-up

So the closet in my classroom was a disaster area. Lesson plans, curriculum guides, art supplies, and textbooks were shoved into this good-sized closet along with materials left from the previous teacher who taught in that room. Add to that all that was piled in there by the maintenance staff when they replaced my carpets and you can start to get the picture - I didn't ever open the door because things would fall off the shelf.

It was time. I had to address the issue, and during post-planning (between a myriad of meetings, of course) I made time to clean out the closet of doom (and dust, I later found). My tactic: divide and conquer, and fast.

Step 1. Take everything out. You can't organize unless you see what you have, and what you are working with. Once everything was spilled out all over my room, it was like Christmas in June. I found great lesson activities and books that I had no idea I owned. It was also like a graveyard - I had articles and curriculum guides so outdated that I was embarrassed to throw them in the recycle bin fearing someone would see it and connect it to me.

Step 2. Make piles. By putting things in piles I was able to see how many things I had in duplicate or worse, triplicate, which made recycling that much easier. I was able to create piles of things no longer needed that I could pass on to colleagues who might be better able to use it.

Step 3. Recycle, big time. Just about everything these days is on the internet and can be found with just a few clicks. I had been keeping a hard copy of everything - articles, newspapers, magazines, lesson plans - but I realized what a waste of space that was. I kept planning to use the magazines in class, and every once in a while I did. But an article every once in a while doesn't make up for keeping a stack of nearly 200 magazines. Into the recycle bin they went, and guess what? I haven't missed them since.

Step 4. Replace in groups. Once the piles were organized all over my tables, replacing the important things back into the closets was easy. Grouped by topic, I can now find exactly what I'm looking for. Binders here, DVDs there, Economics to the left, Journalism to the right. Ahhh (that's me breathing a sigh of relief).