Why the Project Approach?

In "The Project Approach to Early Childhood Education," an article that serves as the foundation of an Out of the Box Training Kit by the same name, Lilian Katz describes the nature and the benefits of the Project Approach:

"The Project Approach to early childhood education is one that incorporates project work as an important part of the larger curriculum.  A project is an in-depth investigation of a topic — ideally, one worthy of the children's time and energy.  In the course of these investigations, children are encouraged to formulate questions to be answered by the investigation, to make predictions about what the answers might be, and to compare their findings with those predictions.  The children are also encouraged to represent their ideas, theories, hypotheses, and predictions using a wide variety of media such as drawing, role-playing, and making models.

"One of the major benefits of the Project Approach is that it supports children's intellectual development while also providing contexts for the application of their growing academic skills.  The intellectual dispositions, most of which are in-born in all children, include the dispositions to be curious, to make sense of experience, and to explore the environment.  Good project work capitalizes on these intellectual dispositions.  In the course of efforts to represent their theories and findings, their desire to learn and apply the basic academic skills involved in literacy and numeracy typically emerge.  The purposes and uses of these basic academic skills gradually become clear and meaningful to them. In this way, project work is complementary to the more formal parts of the curriculum in which children are aided in the acquisition of basic skills."

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