FAQs
The Reggio Emilia Approach is an early year’s education philosophy based on the image of the child. This progressive way of learning allows children to create their own learnings and be self-inspired to be learners for life.
The RE approach has gained the popularity in the past two decades due to its strong belief in regarding children as the decision maker. The philosophy inspires children to direct their plays and allows children choices and facilitate them to think critically. An essential element is to learn from working rather than from reading or seeing. Learning happens when children gain context through the process of making meaning from continuous encounters with happenings around them.
The 100 languages are a metaphor for the extraordinary potential of children. Loris Malaguzzi founder of the RE approach describes various ways in which children express, explore, connect, create, imagine, innovate, feel, dream and make things happen. Written in a beautiful poem called a 100 Languages.
None of the preschools in the country are affiliated to any board; preschools in India do not require any sort of board affiliation. Affiliations are required from class one onwards and if someone says they are board affiliated it’s because their primary and secondary schools have affiliation.
Teachers are trained fundamentally on the image of child, the pedagogy of listening, pedagogical documentation, environment as the third teacher, and working with the community. Teachers are encouraged to be researchers as they reflect on and wonder about their work with children.
We have a very structured backend to be able to create an unstructured creative learning environment for our children. Children receive needed exposure to language development and early math and science skills, as well as art, music, drama, and nature experiences through activities, classroom interventions and project work. Our focus is for children to be confident keen learners who are able to adapt to and extract learning from any environment at kindergarten and beyond.
With an alternative schooling method, do children lack behind with academics as compared to other schools?
Children are learning 21st century life skills in the school with no pressure or compulsion. Children here have the space to learn by themselves so they learn things beyond a specified syllabus like in other schools. In our view, children are far more accomplished at any given age.
Children grow at different paces and to assess them all on a single set of criteria are superficial. This approach doesn’t mean we ignore learning outcomes, on the contrary we are extremely aware of each child’s development need and stage. We observe and document on a daily basis and have an extensive focus on an observation-based assessment. Literacy and numeracy are part of the expected learning outcomes and but not limited to these.
We believe in a smooth transition for the child from the home environment to the school environment. Since the parent is a partner in a child’s education, we place importance on the parent’s availability for the child during transition.
We focus on the whole child and work for global development. Physical, social, emotional, cognitive, literacy and numeracy all are given equal focus.