Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/exploring-materials-from-the-perspective-of-children/5027336/
*Photos can be found in the pdf version of this article.
There are worlds to explore within the different aspects of a learning experience. Meaningful engagement with materials helps us open the door to these worlds of discovery. For instance, consider a child beginning to make sense of the relationship of sound to wind and rain in a thunderstorm, swaying to recorded sounds of the storm while marking the storm’s movement with pastels along a papered wall. Within this moment in time, there are countless ideas to investigate and forms the child’s exploration can take, that lead to new questions and even deeper understanding.
As a visual artist, Jane Broderick has been profoundly inspired by the hundred languages concept of the Reggio Emilia Approach, offering “tools and materials that make it possible for children to have experiences in which their thinking takes on different forms (visual, musical, dance, verbal)” (Vecchi, 2010). Different than a typical art program, the Reggio Emilia Approach is a process where materials are intentionally embedded to support and extend the learning within a curriculum that emerges from children’s current thinking, questioning, and understanding (MacRae, 2013; Rinaldi, 2021).
Many educators in early childhood and the arts haven’t had access ...