Reflecting on Reggio – A Series of Wonderings

Wondering #1 – How can I set the classroom up to honor participation and relationship?

I was fortunate to be a part of a Reggio Emilia Study Group with the Vancouver Reggio Association in March 2025. I filled a notebook with words, my brain with wonderings, and my heart with joy and a sense of what’s truly possible in education. It’s an experience like no other – a tapestry of professional growth and personal growth in one full week of joyful learning, connecting and collaborating. This is the first in a series of posts as I compile my reflections on my week at the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, the schools and the community of Reggio Emilia, Italy.

“The environment should act as an aquarium which reflects the ideas, ethics, attitudes and culture of the people who live in it.” Loris Malaguzzi

As I look back at my notes from day 1 in Reggio Emilia, I’m left with more questions than answers. This happens often when immersed in the pedagogy of Reggio Emilia. A new school year is beginning and teachers have the privilege of setting up the classroom environment. This is at the top of my mind right now, so I share these wonderings with you, in hopes that it gives you a new way to think about setting up your classroom environment as I ponder setting up mine, with a goal of participation and relationship.

“Participation is the way to live in day-to-day relationship. Participation gives substance to rights. It is a way to achieve being a community.” Elena Maccaferri and Lisa Castronuovo, pedagogistas

What if we considered participation as a metaphor for relationship and learning? We participate to have fun and for joy. So how can we encourage participation in our classroom? Participation that children choose willingly and joyfully. I’m thinking of a new way to define “participation” – a definition that goes beyond doing what the teacher says. Rather, participation as a way of relationship and community.

What if we considered that the body is fundamental to learning? It’s where our sense of being in the world lies – with listening, feeling, being and becoming. How might this change our thinking as we plan the classroom space? For me, this means paying attention to the aesthetics. What senses are activated as I enter the classroom? What do children hear, smell, feel, see? What invitations are available for children as they explore the classroom? Can I invite children in to their space without having to say, “no, don’t touch, that’s for later, etc..”? Is it truly their classroom? Can they find cozy spaces with things familiar to them – such as family photos, favorite books from prior grades, stuffed animals of favorite characters, invitations to play with colorful and interesting objects? I want to fill my classroom with natural lighting or lamps, not the harsh overhead lighting. I will have larger areas for children to move and areas that are more compact, where children can make a tent or fit themselves into a smaller space. There will be a large group gathering area that is surrounded by shelves with our classroom library, so children feel like they are being hugged by favorite authors and the books we will love and learn with. I will have spaces to explore sensory materials, such as sand and water. I will have tables for children to work at, as well as spaces to stand and work or be on the floor. I don’t assign seats, as I believe that children can choose where they work best. This is something I will teach right away. Giving children control of as much as possible will help our classroom community come together and will give children a sense of agency and self-efficacy. I am continually asking myself what I can let go of controlling and hand over to the children. There are a surprising amount of things that teachers think we need to do that children are quite capable of doing! What might you give over to the children this year?

Do our classrooms honor children, who they are and who they are becoming? Do they honor the ideas, ethics, attitudes and cultures of the children and the teachers, as a community? I want to be sure my classroom is a blank page, so to speak, when children enter it. The walls are empty – with the exception of our linear calendar wall, family photos, our daily routines and a few select pieces of art that appeal to me and to children (Kandinsky, VanGogh, Picasso) or collaborative art from previous classes. The rest of the room will eventually be filled with children’s art and the tracks of their learning. I will have the fundamental space set up in a way that reflects what I know about young children and how they learn, but it will have many possibilities to be formed into a space that honors our community. The context is always evolving in response to what I observe and what the children tell me. Last year’s class loved blocks and our block area kept growing. The upcoming class might be the same, or they may need a larger art area. Time will tell. As I get to know them, we will negotiate the space to work for all of us. I want to be sure to keep my classroom clutter-free and well taken care of. I want to be sure that all materials I put out have a specific purpose and are taken care of. I model this and trust that children will take care of things. Children notice the “un-taken care of” in a space and it sends a message. When we take great care of our environments, the children will follow. Our environment is constantly transforming and evolving, as we follow the children and our community as it is being created.

“Care takes care and brings care.” Bellelli School teacher

What are your wonderings as a new school year approaches? How can you help make your environment an “aquarium”, reflecting the community of learners in the space this year?

Check back soon for the next post reflecting on Reggio.

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Your Brain on Art

I just finished reading Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. There was so much to consider while reading this book! The folks at The Studio for Playful Inquiry are doing a book study this month, and I’m excited to dive deeper into this book with others.

I was left with the understanding of how art is (or should be!) essential in our lives – for physical health, for emotional wellness, for connection, for relationship, for making sense of the world we live in, for relating to others, for self-expression, for being fully human – for pretty much everything. The importance of the arts is scientifically proven and well-researched in the field of neuroaesthetics (the scientific study of the neural bases for the contemplation and creation of a work of art). Art experiences should be available to everyone.

And school is one place we can make those art experiences available! I believe art is a right for children. And to be clear, I’m not talking about crafts – where children are instructed to follow the teacher’s lead and example to create something that looks like everyone else’s craft. I’m talking about art experiences that are open-ended, process oriented (focused on experimenting and exploring materials as one creates), playful, unique and limitless. Art is a way children can play, communicate, process experiences and feelings, use their imagination and negotiate meaning in endless ways. Our art experiences include paper, clay, loose parts, nature, markers, paint, pens, keyboards, drums, rhythm sticks, storytelling, drama, nature walks, light boxes, projectors, pencils, chalk, scissors, wire, cardboard, beads, staplers, tape and more.

In our kindergarten classroom, the art area is a favorite space to go – and this art area often expands throughout the room – and outdoors. I provide a multitude of materials, adding more things as children request them or when I see that a new material is needed. Materials are displayed and arranged in ways that children can access them independently. Children are invited to make and create in the art center during morning arrival, our Readers and Writers Playshop time and Choice Time throughout the day.

I introduce artists and their works throughout the year. Andy Goldsworthy, Alma Thomas, Howardena Pindell, Wassily Kandinsky, Picasso, Monet, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Joan Miro, Paul Klee, Fanny Sanin, Bisa Butler, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeffrey Gibson, Sonia Delaunay, Alan Shields, Georgia O’Keefe and Alexander Calder were some of the artists we discovered this past year. I also spend a great deal of time talking and learning about illustrators in the books we read. I teach the children to read art with the “I see, I think, I wonder, I feel” thinking routine from Project Zero. Each time we look at art or think about art, I make the connection that they are artists, too – and they might be inspired by the artists we get to know, or each other. I want the children to see themselves as artists and to have a sense of self-efficacy surrounding art and being creative. Creativity is an essential piece of our lives and our classrooms should nurture and allow for creative experiences.

“Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.” Loris Malaguzzi

How can you provide experiences and creative opportunities and invitations for the children you teach? How can art become another language in your classroom? And what might that mean for you, as an educator? Having a “sense of freedom to venture beyond the known” makes me think of limitless possibilities for children, and for us as educators. I think art can provide that space for us.

*Using loose parts, paper and pen to tell a story*

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Storytelling and Beyond

Storytelling is a tremendous way to engage in meaningful literacy learning and play in your classroom – no matter the age of your learners. I encourage you to welcome the stories your students bring into the classroom, to encourage the wonderings and noticings of the stories that live in the land we learn and play on, and to make the space for children to explore these stories in multi-modal ways. Children deserve to have stories fill their lives and to have their stories be listened to and celebrated.

I wrote a guest post on the CCIRA blog! Please visit their page to read the post in its entirety. Enjoy!

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Agreements & Who We Are

I’ve spent a lot of time reading everything that Tom Drummond and Teacher Tom have written and I simply love the way they honor children and view them as capable human beings. I’ve paid close attention to how they use language in everything, but especially in creating boundaries and expectations for the class community. This year I decided to try something new surrounding creating rules, or agreements as we call them, as we create a community together in our kindergarten class.

We started the year by having a conversation to negotiate what we need to do in order for us to have a safe and fun space to learn together. I shared my non-negotiable rules first: No hurting each other or putting someone in danger with your voice or body. No destroying property. Then I opened up the conversation for our negotiable rules. As Tom Drummond says, “negotiable rules are goals for harmonious community interactions”. We started by talking about what kind of class we want to have. As we talked, I asked the kids, “how do you think we can do that here?” I was curious as to what children with little to no school experience might say. What their idea of “rules” might be. In the past, I haven’t spent much time on this with kindergarteners until later in the year. But I wanted to start the conversation early, and have the kids begin generating the expectations for our year together. I wanted to hear their voices, what mattered to them and have them own the class we were creating together. One of the first conversations was had when I noticed that everyone seemed to have a need to RUN FULL SPEED anywhere they wanted to go. Now, I love to run, I know kids need to run (and that’s a big reason we have 2 recess times) and I wish we could run all day, but the reality of 20 kids running full speed in a crowded classroom means that an accident is inevitable – and that was a good opening for our conversation. I reminded the kids that a non-negotiable for me is that no one can hurt or put someone else in danger, and when kids are running in the classroom someone will get hurt. Then I asked them, “so what can we do about that?” This is the language I come back to over and over as issues arise, and as we need to revise our agreements. The chart below shows how our chart looks at this point in the year – a work in progress.

As we created the list, and continued to have conversations around it, I asked the kids for their agreement before I wrote each one. The item needed to have full agreement by everyone in the class, including me, before going on the chart. If we couldn’t agree, then it didn’t get written down. This list became known as “Our Agreements”. We refer back to the list often – at first with my guidance (“I want to remind you that you and friends agreed to…”) and eventually with kids generating the conversation and talking to friends about the agreements on their own. If someone throws something, we remind each other that we have an agreement not to throw. If a friend is being mean, you might hear someone say, “that was mean and we have an agreement not to be mean, please stop”. As problems or issues come up throughout the year, we decide together if a new “agreement” needs to be added or revised. Looking at this chart you might be thinking, “wait, I’ve always been told never to write down “rules” in the negative – we should write what we want kids to do, not behaviors that we don’t want to see”. But here’s the thing – this chart was generated by the kids. I wrote their exact words. They own it – and therefore, they are accountable to these agreements. If I had suggested “let’s write ‘keep hands to ourselves’ instead of ‘no kicking, no hitting, no scratching’…” it would then become MY agreements. Kids would happily say “yes, keep hands to ourselves”, but would they really own it? I’ve seen firsthand a list that was “kind of” generated with kids (but with a heavy teacher hand) be completely ignored, and how there is great power in the agreements being owned by the children – not by me. So I’m completely okay with this list of “no” things, because the kids own it, it reflects what matters to them, they refer to it, and most importantly – they hold each other accountable if agreements are broken because these are the promises they’ve made to each other.

In December, I felt that we were ready to take the agreements to a new level, so we started a conversation about who we are as a class – and what kind of class we want to be. I recorded their thinking and we continue to add to this chart. It’s still a work in progress. I’ve written about this process here. When we came back to school after winter break, I pulled out this chart and we started doing some deep thinking and reflecting on our school year so far – and focusing on what kind of future we want for our class. We revisited our agreements and had some conversations about favorite books and characters and how they connect to who we are as a class and as individuals. We will continue to engage in this conversation for the next week or so, adding and revising our chart, and then we will create our own co-constructed chart that speaks to who we are as a class – creating our future together. There is great power in speaking things into being. By setting goals and ideals, opening up a conversation about how we can get there, declaring who we are, making agreements, holding each other accountable, and talking together when things aren’t working – children take on ownership, responsibility and love for each other as human beings.

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New Beginnings

*Sunrise from an AirBnB I stayed at this summer during a trail running mountain weekend in Virginia*

As summer draws to a close, that bittersweet feeling emerges once again. While I love my summers, I also love my job. I look forward to welcoming a new group of kindergarteners as much as I look forward to weekday trail runs in the mountains, family time, leisurely puppy walks and lazy days reading at the pool. I’ve always felt so fortunate to have a job that has such a defined starting and stopping point with a chance to recharge in between.

School has been in the back of my mind all summer long, but now it’s moving to the front. I’m catching up on those professional books that have been piling up. I bought my new notebook and calendar for the year. I have my new reading glasses and brand new Flair pens ready to go. I’ve done home visits to meet the incoming kindergarteners. And I am starting to visualize my classroom space and the four and five year olds who will live there soon. I’m thinking of my goals for the year as a learner and as a teacher. I’m excited for yet another new beginning.

Twenty-eight years ago, when I first started teaching, I spent a lot of time before school started designing bulletin boards, cutting out letters and stapling up borders, making seating arrangements, carefully writing labels with kid’s names, crafting cute behavior management systems (something I cringe at now), and doing other things – stuff – that I felt was necessary. But how I choose to spend my days before I welcome the kids has changed drastically for me. It’s now about my “why” – my reason for being a teacher. It’s about community, identity, freedom and love.

Now I spend the days leading up to the start of the new school year revisiting old favorite professional books like Choice Words and Troublemakers, writing and reflecting about the past year, revisiting my notebooks from the past years, thinking about the aesthetics and the space, imagining what might come up in our learning space and rehearsing how I might handle problems and how I can invite children into our space as a community of learners, explorers and problem solvers. I think a lot about the intentional language I will use because I know how much language matters. I visit some of my favorite online places like Tom Drummond, Fairy Dust Teaching and Opal School and get inspired with new possibilities to try in the upcoming year. I spend a lot of time thinking, reading, writing and anticipating what our year might bring. My focus is on the children and the community we will create together.

When I welcome children into our room the last week of August, they will enter a thoughtful, beautiful, inviting space – that is also a blank canvas, inviting them to make their mark and make it their own. My bulletin boards are empty (except for our linear calendar), the walls are mostly empty (except for a few choice pieces of art done by former classes), the space is organized and inviting with books, plants and invitations to play – but open to change and revision based on what these children might need. I want my new class to enter our room and feel a sense of wonder, delight, curiosity and excitement, as well as a feeling of belonging. I want every child to feel that they can be who they are in our classroom. It’s not my space – it is our space.

I still have a few more weeks to dive deeper into my “why” for this year. To plan out those first important read aloud books and to think deeply about what kind of community we are going to create together. What an exciting time of year for teachers! A fresh start, a new beginning, a chance to create something magical – alongside a group of wonderful tiny humans. How lucky I am.

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One Big Word

A class book we made after exploring the One Big Word – LOVE

Last year at the annual NCTE convention, I went to an amazing session by the teachers at Opal School. I left with pages of notes and thoughts from their brilliant thinking, but the one thing that really stayed with me was the idea of “cracking open a word” – seeing what’s inside of a word for all of us in the class. I immediately returned to our classroom and began the ritual of our “One Big Word”.

Over the past year, we’ve explored many words that spoke to our class community. We engage in an inquiry about what that word might mean and how the meaning of the word might be different for all of us. We read books about this word and discover books that connect to the word, make books about the word, find pieces of art that connects to the word for us, draw pictures of what the word means to us, find characters that connect to our word, have Hands-Down Conversations around the word, and record our thinking on a large chart. These charts serve as anchors to our classroom community and conversations we may have in times of celebration or times of difficulty. We refer back to them often. Many of our Friendship Workshops are focused around our current One Big Word, or revisiting past words.

The words are chosen by listening to the children and what seems to be important, interesting or something that might be beneficial to explore deeper. Sometimes the kids suggest a word, sometimes I propose a word, sometimes a word comes out of an experience or a book we read. Sometimes we spend a week with a word, sometimes it’s a month. All of this is done in a way responsive to the children in our community at the present time. Some of the words we’ve explored are: kind, friend, community, listen, love, empathy, compassion, hero & shero, persistence, joy and brave.

Here are a few of our One Big Words and some images that capture our thinking. Enjoy!

Reading our book about our One Big Word, LOVE to our pre-K friends

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The Linear Calendar Wall

“For 5 and 6 year olds, time becomes marked by what happened yesterday, today and what might happen tomorrow.”

Sally Haughey – Fairy Dust Teaching

Our linear calendar is an important teaching tool and classroom routine in our kindergarten world. This idea was born after many conversations with Kassia Omohundro Weekend, author of Math Exchanges, as we were both beginning new school years teaching kindergarten for the first time. We weren’t satisfied with the typical calendar routines in kindergarten (or the higher grades we had previously taught) and started to ask ourselves what would be a meaningful and authentic engagement for documenting the passage of time. We wanted to incorporate a time line of sorts, along with an audit trail documenting our learning together over the course of a year. The linear calendar has evolved a bit over the past seven years, but it remains an important piece of our classroom journey.

I get a calendar from an office supply store every summer and pull it apart. I display it from August to July on a large bulletin board in our room. Every month is included because I want it to show a full calendar year. The first thing that goes on the calendar is our birthdays. I spend time the first week of school having each child find his or her birthday month and day and put a star sticker on that day. This is how the calendar wall is introduced to the children. I see a lot of talk and curiosity as they ask, “When is my birthday?”, “How many months until my birthday?”, and “Look! My birthday is close to (a friend’s) birthday!”

Each month, I take that page off the wall and bring it over to our meeting area. We interact with this calendar all month in an authentic way – just like I write in my calendar planner. Together, we write in important events such as Back to School Night, early releases, guest speakers, teacher workdays, holidays, etc. We indicate days we are in school and days we are at home by highlighting weekends and holidays with a yellow marker. I spend time at the beginning of each month showing how the calendar flows into the next month by starting on the next day. This is a tricky concept and one worth talking about every month. Some years I have cut the extra days off the end and beginning of the month so the kids can see how it all fits together. When August ends on a Wednesday, then Thursday is the first day of September.

Every day we look at the calendar during morning meeting and see what is happening that day and what might be happening later in the week. At the end of the day, we cross out the day and write what day of school we just finished. We look to see what is happening tomorrow and for the rest of the week. I’ve found this SO much more meaningful than a song about what “yesterday, today and tomorrow” is, a sentence frame about what today is and what tomorrow with be or a recitation of reading the calendar – all things I’ve done in the past and yet, in June, many kids didn’t know how to interact with a calendar or tell you when tomorrow is.

The kids interact with this calendar on their own throughout the day. You can see them reading it with pointers, talking about how many days until winter break, counting days until the next birthday, reflecting on things we did in prior months, and having conversations during play, reading, etc. I am always amazed at the meaningful conversations that happen in front of the calendar wall.

At the end of each month, we reflect on all that we accomplished or experienced that month. We create an interactive writing piece together to summarize the month, and choose pictures to display on our calendar wall. The children and I put this together and display it above the calendar month page. This creates a timeline that captures our year together. Children, families and visitors all enjoy looking at our wall story about the year.

With each month page, I also display the piece of art that each child creates on their birthday, and birthday cards with the child’s name, picture and birth date.

Engaging the children in meaningful conversation, noticings, experiences and authentic calendar interactions and talk is appropriate and beneficial in kindergarten. It’s also fun!

I’ve found the linear calendar to be an essential tool in the teaching and learning in our classroom. I hope this post is helpful to anyone interested in creating one with their kids! Enjoy!

Our 2018-2019 calendar wall – ready to go!

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Exploring Identity: How do I see myself? How do others see me?

Exploring identity, and beginning to understand who we are and who we are not as individuals and as a community, is a huge part of my teaching. I start this inquiry on day one and continue it throughout the year. One big project we do is with skin color.

When it started to come up in our conversations, I read a few books that explore skin color. The Colors of Us, Shades of People, The Skin You Live In, Chocolate Me and All the Colors We Are, are a few of our favorites. We learned about the science behind skin color and played around with mixing paints that match our skin color. Based on the beautiful language in The Colors of Us, we chose our words for what we would call our skin color. We made up colors like, “whipped cream peach” and “cocoa caramel mocha” and “honey gingerbread”. We mixed the paints and made our self-portraits.

Our big questions that guided this inquiry were:

Why is our skin different colors?

How do I see myself?

How do others see me?

Who am I? Who are we?

We read books, had lots of conversations, made art and played around with self-portraits in many different mediums – using paint chips, buttons, empty picture frames, ribbons and assorted loose parts. We interviewed our friends and asked them, Who am I to you? and How do you see me?. In our completed self-portrait paintings, we wrote the answers to these questions. We also created and drew a symbol that represented who we are in the world.

This exploration into skin color and self-identity was a celebration of who we are and who we are to our friends and to each other. It made our community even stronger and helped us explore, appreciate and celebrate the differences and the similarities that make us special. We will continue to go back and revisit our thinking, revise our thinking and celebrate who we are as a community this year.

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Building a Conversation

I’ve been playing around with hands down conversations as part of our morning meetings. Inspired by my friends and brilliant thinkers, @kassiaowedekind and @TeacherThomp and the work they are doing with talk, I’ve really enjoyed this new start to our day.

As the kids come in each morning, I listen to what they are chatting about. I get a sense for what is interesting to the kids that day and use that information to start our hands down conversation. After our morning announcements, we gather together on the rug and I invite someone to start our conversation around that topic. The conversation may (and often does) change topics, but I help them get started with a common topic. For now. Yesterday, everyone was talking about the upcoming tornado drill.

“We have to go in the basement!”

“Tornadoes don’t happen here. They never do.”

“It’s raining now, are we really having a tornado?”

“Is this a practice or real?”

“What is a tornado?”

I could sense that this was something we needed to talk about before going into the hallway for the drill. The kids took the topic and had a great hands down conversation, answering each others questions, talking about worries, and putting each other at ease. I joined the conversation a little, sharing about my experiences as a child in Michigan with real tornadoes and super scary drills in the basement of our school. But I wasn’t the center of the conversation in any way. The kids respectfully listened to each other, added on to what others said, asked questions and jumped into the conversation when there was that natural opening. They are starting to monitor each other for interruptions, often reminding friends to, “please don’t step on my words”.

We’ve talked a lot about how we “build a conversation”, something I first read about in Maria Nichol’s wonderful book, Comprehension Through Conversation. When we first started these conversations, there were about four kids who dominated every conversation. The rest of the class listened (usually), but rarely jumped in. I brought that up to the kids and we talked about how we build a conversation when different people add to the conversation. I used blocks to show how building a conversation by adding new people is a lot like building a structure by adding new blocks. They got it. I was really amazed at how that shifted our conversations and how more kids participated.

Starting our day with authentic, hands down conversations, with opportunities for all children to talk, has been a wonderful shift away from the structured, very school-based, “share time” when one child shares and then picks a few friends to comment or ask questions. I’m looking forward to exploring this more and to reading about the thinking that Kassia and Christy do on their new blog.

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Currently – In Our Classroom

watching – tall block towers, pieces of art in various stages of completion, children making books, book boxes bursting at the seams, a vet clinic that has just about lost the excitement, legos that have been made into Bayblades and are spinning all over the room

listening – to children talk about art, “I see….I think…I feel….”, and to children learning how to navigate conversations in authentic ways

appreciating – the freedom to allow kids to play and a large space to give kids multiple spaces to play, work and live for 180 days

loving – the excitement around our field trip to the National Gallery of Art tomorrow

dancing – the life cycle of a mealworm, which is actually not a worm, but an insect – they become baby beetles

wishing – for more time to do documentation of all the learning that happens every day

planning – the launch of our next PBL – creating an geometry art museum

creating – a collaborative art piece on a canvas with blues and greens for the background – looking forward to adding more things to our mixed media piece

reading – Art Is…, Alfie: (The Turtle That Disappeared), Uni the Unicorn and the Dream Come True, The Big Umbrella, The Water Princess, Sandy’s Circus: A Story About Alexander Calder, Action Jackson, Be Kind, The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art, Love

writing – nonfiction books, guided reading books for my kids about friends and things they love, labels for our beautiful stuff to create with

wondering – about Reggio practices, about culturally relevant teaching, about what worked well today and what didn’t, about where we are going next

Day 6

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