Last semester for my placement, I was invited to come with
the other kindergarten teachers to go to an exhibit called The Hundred Languages of Children by the children and teachers of The
Municipal Infant-Toddler Centres and Preschools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. I was
able to buy a book from this exhibition that displays and talks about each of
the exhibitions that were showed by the children, which is called Catalogue
of the exhibit: The Hundred Languages of Children (Filippini, T. & Vecchi,
1996).
I believe that this book is a very good source for me for my future teaching
career as each of the experiences that the children took part in were very
inspirational and they will be helpful to look at when I am planning my
experiences for children when I am a teacher. I am very interested in the ways
that the children learn through the Reggio Emilia approach as the children are
given a lot of freedom to learn and develop literacy and numeracy related
skills through play. The experiences that the children took part in were inclusive
and integrated as many different types of concepts of literacy and numeracy
were integrated into each of the experiences.
One learning experience that the children did
in a preschool in Reggio Emilio was that they were learning about crowds. The
arts that were used in this learning experience were media, visual arts and
drama. For visual arts, children drew pictures of people doing different
actions and how people looked like in different crowds (Filippini & Vecchi,
1996, p. 144). Through drawing these pictures, children were developing
numeracy skills through learning about shapes, patterns and space. While
through developing literacy skills, children were learning to communicate and
describe the actions that each person was doing in the crowd and talk about the
differences of each person. The children would’ve learned new knowledge of describing
words. The children also used clay to make the people in a crowd doing
different actions (Filippini & Vecchi, 1996, p. 152). Through this
experience children would have also learned about different shapes and how to
balance different shapes on top of each other to create the people. The
children would’ve also been developing their fine motor skills when using the
clay. The children used digital media to capture photos of different crowds (Filippini
& Vecchi, 1996, p. 155). Through capturing photos, the children would’ve
been exploring with the camera and they would be using their vocabularies to be
able to describe what each person looked like in the crowds. Also the children became a crowd through drama
by being different characters in a crowd through the ways they walked and the
behaviours they had (Filippini & Vecchi, 1996, p. 149). Through doing this experience,
the children were learning how to socially convey literacy and numeracy
learning through copying the actions of people in the crowds. They would’ve
been learning about space and distance and how much space to stand apart from
each other. They would’ve also been using communication to be able to talk to
each other and become the people in the crowds.
Picture of the crowd that the children made using clay
from: Filippini, T. & Vecchi, V. (Eds.). (1996). Catalogue of
the exhibit: The Hundred Languages of Children
(p. 153). Reggio Emilia, Italy:
Reggio Children.
This experience is just one of many
experiences that I have read about in the book that I have. Through reading
this book, it has really helped me to see how children can learn about one
topic through many different experiences. The experiences that the children
took part in also helped the children to gain many different numeracy and
literacy related skills that they can use in their everyday lives and when they
are walking in crowds. Through observing people in crowds, the children would also be learning about how everyone is individual and unique. This experience I believe would be good to use in early
childhood centres to be able to teach children about how people do behave and
look like in crowds. These experiences in the book also help children to
explore and learn about many different topics. I will definitely be using this
book when I am a teacher as I know that the experiences that are displayed in
the book will be useful for the children I teach to help them develop skills in
literacy and numeracy :)
Filippini,
T. & Vecchi, V. (Eds.). (1996). Catalogue of the exhibit: The Hundred
Languages of Children (pp.144 – 155).
Reggio Emilia, Italy: Reggio Children.
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