In the Reggio Emilia Approach, the whole physical environment where children can explore their curiosities, communicate with their senses and concretize their learning is expressed with the concept of "Envoirment as the third teacher".
For children its "play", for adults its "project"
Although we put the title "Projects", we want to talk about our "learning experiences" that are shaped by the children's curiosity without crushing them with the name of "Project". At Meşe Palamudu, we do not apply a prepared and repeated curriculum. We observe the children's curiosity and interest and then feed the process with environments that can develop these curiosities. Sometimes a curiosity is adopted by the whole class, sometimes different curiosities emerge in small groups of 3 or 5 children. Curiosity is a much more powerful effect than a curriculum or an activity prepared by predicting the children's attention span. Moreover, "Learning what you are curious about is a child's right."
In the Reggio Emilia Approach, the project process is likened to "spaghetti" pasta.
It is a non-breaking, tangling, forward and backward bending road. On this road, both social and physical environments are structured for children to experience in their potential development area. Customized environments are designed to support them in developing their expression paths, which we call the languages of the child. Light table, overhead projector and other lightreflection devices are arranged as technical development corners during the project process. There is no curriculum but there are always detailed plans on how to follow the children's curiosity. The most important elements of the project are that the process does not break away from the child, that learning chasing curiosity takes place in the form of peer learning, that children use their senses actively to concretize the experience, that they make inferences that we call hypothesis, and most importantly, that all these happen within the children's games.