How Does it Emerge?

03/09/2020

Stand aside for a while and leave room for learning, observe carefully what children do, and then, if you have understood well, perhaps teaching will be different from before.
Loris Malaguzzi

Writing about the joys of emergent curriculum in an article that forms the basis of an Out of the Box Training Kit, Lois M. Ingellis describes how themes can’t really be planned in advance. She explains that “I reflected on the way that themes emerged this year. We didn’t do any snow-related themes because there was no snow to speak of. I often read the book, Dreams: The Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. (by Peter Murray) to the children for his birthday in January. The story included his experiencing getting new shoes, which seemed to be the impetus for the class doing something with shoes…Other years the children related to the idea of dreams and we had explored nighttime/dreams/the winter night sky…

I like not knowing exactly where we are going to end up, and am often surprised at the depth and breadth of the children’s thinking."

Funshine Express - If you used Funshine Express your lesson plans would be finished by now.

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