Reggio Emilia Pedagogy at Home: Practical Guide 2025

● The Importance of the Emergent Curriculum

By basing teaching on children's interests, we facilitate their concentration, their desire to acquire knowledge, and master a skill. As they progress toward their goal, with each new achievement, they release dopamine, feel pleasure in learning, and thereby become motivated to continue learning and be actively engaged in their activities.

2. The 100 Languages: Multiplying Means of Expression

The 100 languages are at the heart of the pedagogy Reggio. Loris Malaguzzi describes them as "an infinity of ways for children to express, explore, and connect their thoughts, feelings, and imaginations."

Music, painting, theater, dance, sewing, pottery, singing are all examples ofexamples of ways for the child to understand, discover, express, and marvel.

100 is a symbolic number; Malaguzzi considers that there are many more means of expression and learning, but he highlights the countless ways ofawaken curiosity and develop children's potential.

● The Importance of the 100 Languages

The many activities that make up the 100 languages can help children control their stress, regulate their emotions, develop creative skills, gain a better understanding of the world around them, and contribute to the development of their entire brain.

3. Project-Based Learning: Learning by Creating

In Reggio pedagogy, projects are long-term works proposed to children starting from their interests, their observations of the world around them. They can last from a few days to several months, during which children deeply study the ideas and concepts surrounding each project.

Adults accompany children by serving as a resource, advising them, helping them guide their research, and choosing the materials best suited to their creation.

● The importance of projects

4. Cooperation: Growing Together with Kindness

Children evolve in an environment that encourages working together, interpersonal relationships, and problem-solving as a group.

Through cooperation in groups of various sizes where every child's voice is heard, they exchange ideas, dialogue, negotiate, compare, concede.

Adults contribute by serving as a resource or by participating and learning themselves.
Activities are decided together, in the form of an assembly, allowing children to parparticipate in a democratic decision-making process.

This approach creates a balance between the sense of self and the sense of belonging to the group.

● The importance of cooperation

This approach contributes to the development of a secure attachment in the child, and through this, to their emotional and intellectual development.

It improves their socialization, desire to discover and learn, ability to focus attention, and phonological and language skills.

It also helps develop their ability to feel and share the emotions and feelings of others (affective empathy), to understand what others feel and think (cognitive empathy), and to care for others' well-being (empathic concern).

By experiencing empathy, children secrete oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins, and serotonin which reduce their stress, stimulate their motivation, stabilize their mood, and promote their well-being and creativity.

5. The Environment: The Third Educator

In Reggio pedagogy, the environment plays such a central role, including in the architecture and layout of the school, that it is called the "third teacher."

Schools are open towards the eoutside, bright and, like the village square, in their center, there is the “piazza” where children play, take part in activities.

It facilitates meetings, relationships, and communication, and it is towards it that all the others environments: the hall opening onto the outdoor courtyard, the workshop for creative activities, the room music room, the laboratory where children conduct experiments, the classrooms where an area is dedicated to projects, the library, the cafeteria and the kitchen where children can interact with the cook, suggest recipes or projects.

● The interest of the environment

The environment provides stimuli and offers opportunities for experiences that are a source of learning and development.

By emphasizing the interconnection of space, children are free to move, explore, follow their own pace, create relationships, communicate.

It can be arranged in a way that creates wonder in the child, which will awaken their curiosity and facilitate their attention. It also contributes to the children's self-confidence, which impacts the arrangement of the place where they evolve.

The environment thus contributes as much to their social functions as to their cognitive ones.

III. Applying Reggio Emilia at Home: Practical Guide

One particularity of the 100 languages is that they also apply to adults. The parent at home, like the teacher at school, will have to wear many hats for the child. They will be a actor in their role plays, a spectator who cheers their performances, an interpreter who will sing their favorite songs, a designer who creates the environment for their activities, a musician, a dancer, etc.

When we find ourselves without words to express an idea, we will call upon the 100 languages to "invent" words, use images, different ways of saying, showing, make understood, which will be just as enriching for our children.

In practice:

1. Music and singing are sensory, emotional experiences. Children use their sight, touch, hearing. They learn to recognize the sound of musical notes, scales, rhythms. They can learn lyrics made up of new words, to sing in cchoir with us, in canon, discover thirds, fifths. Reinvent a song by changing its lyrics while keeping its melody, and vice versa, and our children then become author or co-author.

With the instruments we have available, or simply percussion using whatever is at hand like pots, bowls, wooden or metal spoons and forks, we can watch them or accompany them by singing or dancing.

They can become composers, reproduceplay the melody of a song they like on a xylophone, try to generate a note just on a harmonica (good luck to them!) or imagine their own melodies, and above all try, attempt things, enjoy it, and repeat.

2. Drawing and painting allow them to create representations of the world around them and of their understanding of the latter, of what they learn from it, of recreating everyday scenes. They will express feelings or emotions ("there is mom, she is happy"), actions ("that's me playing ball"), sometimes simply gestures without intentions, without symbols, but that may eventually find meaning once on paper (or not!).

All it takes is a piece of paper, even if it is not blank, the back of an old invoice, a piece of cardboard, and a pencil or a ballpoint pen for them to get started.
Colors help to learn new words, but their imagination is not limited by their absence. Painting allows them to learn to create colors from other colors, and to "imagine" new ones, without limits.

3. Childrenchildren like to tell things. What they experience during the day, events memorable, stories they liked. We can thus accompany them to transcribe these stories in writing, whether small paragraphs or poems. We will then read them together, with them, phrase by phrase or verse by verse. Telling stories before being literate will serve as an introduction to reading and writing.

And little by little, we will be able to play with them to create rhymes, learning to play with words, reformulating sentences, using synonyms. We can help them write in alternate rhymes, embraced, even learning the concepts of syllables and expressing themselves in alexandrines.

4. Chinese shadows have the interest of discovering light games, perspectives, shapes, etc. They also allow making images with almost nothing, sometimes intentionally where the shadow of their hand is a cat, a dog, a rabbit (or anything else, and notdoesn't resemble necessarily), sometimes by observation, where, as with clouds, it is the child who will see in a shadow an object, an animal, a person (even though it doesn't resemble it either). And then, from these shadows and the images they associate with them , our children will be able to tell stories, to themselves as well as to us, and amaze us, as always.

3. Family Projects: From Idea to Realization

● Structure

All the projects our children embark on must be chosen by them and must involve an effort of research to successfully carry out the project. Understanding how a machine works, the structure of a building, the parts that make up a vehicle, or how a chick hatches from its egg are all subjects they will be led to discover in this process.

They are structured in several stages: we discuss the project to be carried out together, we go on observation, we plan by creating representations of what we want to do and how, we investigate the subject by finding answers to our questions and solutions to the problems encountered along the way, and finally we document by displaying the final result, photos of the children carrying out the project, and comments from the children about the project.

● Duration and resources

The pprojects can be multiple, carried out in parallel and last as long as needed until their accomplishment. This period can last a few days or several months (some projects in Reggio schools can extend throughout the school year).

The activities we will be led to propose to them will be a combination of what they express interest in and the resources we have available.

We will always lack a resource or a other, especially if we strive to keep up with the frenetic pace of their awakening, but by letting the creativity of the children speak, their imagination, and ours, we can find compromises that match their thirst for discovery.

The motor skills courses perfectly illustrate this Reggio project approach. The child can imagine a thousand scenarios: adventure course, space base, castle... Each configuration becomes a new project of bodily and imaginative exploration, evolving according to their current interests.

In practice:

1. To decide on the projet, it is appropriate to start from what the child observes and what interests them. Keep in mind that this can be something completely unexpected to our eyes adult, but which is of interest to children.
After observing a fountain in a park that has sparked their curiosity, we can study with our child the functioning of the fountain, and decide to recreate one at home. This interest will then lead them to search, really search.

And questions will be raised : how the water passes-is it from bottom to top, how to do it flow properly, how to create a water jet, etc.
This is also where the role of the adult is essential because we will serve as a resource for our child with what we know, but also what we do not know.

And since we do not know everything (because we are not all experts in fountains), we will also look for and learn how it works and how to put it into practice.

2. It is possible to make puseful projects within the framework of other activities. An obvious example is the play. Children can create costumes, sets, from papier-mâché, by cutting cardboard, paper, pieces of fabric, coloring them, painting them, by repurposing everyday clothes or accessories, then bringing them to life in their play.

Thus, if the children's play is about King Arthur, the children will first look for how a king dresses, find out whlooks like a crown, a sword, how to make them, what a castle is made of, where the moat, towers, drawbridge, arrow slits are - and take the opportunity to learn vocabulary while doing.

3. There is not necessarily a need for a budget for projects. All it takes is a bit of space, research from the child, participation from the adult as a resource, so time to dedicate to our children, and a good dose of creativity among everyone.

If our child wants to draw, a project can be as simple as reproducing a household object they love particularly, we can decide to set up a corner for them to draw with a pencil, paper, and they can take their time, leave their drawing aside to come back to it the next day and the following days.

It will also be possible to decide to tackle relatively complex projects such as recreate a place that our children love or know well, like their street, their neighborhood, their city, their school, using only materials that cost very little money, depending on our space. We can thus use recycled cardboard, from old boards or even palettes if we decide to work outdoors (or if we really have space indoors), paper (newspapers, flyers, etc., there is never a shortage in our mailboxes letters...), a bit of glue, pencils, paint, scissors, and everything that seems useful to us or clever, like old buttons, which can for example be used to represent windows.

4. A project is long-term. It spans a period of time and work is done at intervals regular intervals during this period.

For example, we could create salt dough figurines with the children before Christmas. Find out who the characters are, how to represent them, make the dough, model the figurines, bake them, and finally paint them. We would thus have an activity that could take several days spread over the month of November. But we could decide to make an entire nativity scene, inin which case the number of characters would be much higher, other materials than salt dough would be needed (like the wood of a wine crate for the stable walls, paper for the straw, cardboard for the roof, etc.) and this project could start as early as September, or even before if the goals are ambitious!

5. Here is a story that illustrates the type of project that can be undertaken in Reggio pedagogy. In my childhood, a friend of mine was passionate about everything electronic, but also everything manual. We were eight years old and he liked to understand how things worked. So, when he was given his first computer, he completely disassembled it to then reassemble it entirely.

His father supported him in his project, but he was the initiator. He was not better than others at school, in fact according to the school he was not good at math or in French. And yet at eight years old, he knew which parts made up a computer and how they worked together.

Not all children want to take apart computers (I don't I would never have done it!), but following their interests will allow them to learn things that can sometimes seem complicated for their age - and even for us adults.

4. Family Cooperation: Democracy and Participation

In Reggio pedagogy, the view of children and the way they are considered at school starts from several assumptions: all children are different, difference is important, all children must be heard, there is no hierarchy, division, or separation in the training and education of children.

Au-Beyond the vision of the child's place and rights, there is that of families, teachers, school staff to create solidarity of practices and ideals.

This is what Loris Malaguzzi described as participatory education, with the idea of developing processes of individual and social participation, and co-responsibility.

At home, this involves finding ways to implement practices and processes that promote democracy.

In practice:

1. Projects generate discussions around what interests our children, allowing them to fully participate in choices, decision-makingion, to be the instigators.

The investigations that are integral parts of the projects, when effectively carried out together, in collaboration, will give them a real role in the completion of the projects, not only in their realization but also in the research that will contribute to successfully completing them.

Thus, in a project where they will study the animals living in the pond, we can help them by raising questions like “what do the feet of a duck, a swan, a frog, a turtle look like,” but it will be up to them to find the answers.

We will serve as resource, of course, and we will propose activities that will lead them to learn more, such as making plaster casts from paw prints in the mud, taking photos of them or even pick up feathers, but they will ask for help, they will decide on the interest of these activities, and above all, they will be actors and will fully participate in their realization.

2. In Reggio schools, the participation and management committee meets every month to do the focus on work organization, the environment, discuss external relations and educational and cultural issues.

Because it is not always easy to finding moments to exchange daily and that our calendars are most of the time full of activities that leave no room for choice, nor for for our children, nor for us, it is possible to set aside a moment each week, every 2 weeks, or every month, to organize a family meeting in a more or less formal way.

This meeting will give everyone, especially the children, the opportunity to express their opinions on what happened during the past period and on thethe program for the next period, decide of changes to implement daily, ensuring that the child has a voice and that they feels heard.

3. Some friends, people around us, neighbors, family members, and our commlocal community can share their knowledge. Small shopkeepers, artisans, and local producers often enjoy discussing their trade (especially with children). Fruit and vegetable vendors are often true experts in fruits and vegetables. How they grow, where, at what time of

the year, the different varieties of a species, etc. are information that contributes to the child's learning and can be used in the context of their projects.

We also have friends who are artists or have an artistic streak, play an instrument, have developed their talents for singing, dancing, painting, etc. and will be delighted to share them with our children, who can use them in their projects or simply discover the 100 languages.

5. Creating a Reggio Environment at Home

● An architecture that fosters relationships

Loris Malaguzzi said that the school must be a vector of socialization, democracy, participation, including through its architectural structure. He also spoke of the adult's role as that of a creator of relationships, not only obetween people but also between things, between thoughts, comparing these relationships to the road traffic of a big city like New York, within the school.

By applying this idea to the home context, the constraints are many and space can sometimes be lacking, but we can create spaces that will give our children the benefit of architecture and layout Reggio, creating spaces dedicated to their projects, their activities artistic, etc.

● A place that reflects us

Beyond the school she-itself, the classroom must reflect those who live and learn there: children, as well as parents and teachers. As Malaguzzi said: "The space must be a kind of aquarium that reflects the ideas, values, attitudes, and cultures of the people who live there."

At home, we can rely on this reasoning to consider each individual and try to integrate our children's activities into our different living spaces. Whether it is dedicated supports and spaces properly speaking or displaying their work and the documentation that accompanies them.

In practice:

To declutter the bedroom, our Montessori shelves naturally create Reggio spaces in the living room. Designed at child height, they allow autonomous access to books and materials, promoting this free observation so dear to Reggio pedagogy. Your child can come to this room to spend moments of concentration and reading with you, choosing their own materials.

We can also arrange in the same place or in a closet, a corner where they can find papers, pencils, markers, and paint that they will use on a table.

By placing a box in a corner of the living room, for example, we will store tools or resources intended for their activities, their projects, or even small musical instruments or costume elements for their role-playing games.

2. In Reggio pedagogy, documentation of this is displayed on the ceilings and walls of the school that children create. The documentation must be interesting, serious, and engaging – she

is neither decorative nor entertaining. Theirtheir drawings are captioned with the children's comments. We display photos of them doing activities, during their research within the framework projects, and we hang them on the walls.

By highlighting their work, their discoveries, we value their learning and accomplishments, at-beyond the ornamental or emotional aspect generally given to their achievements. We can set this up in the same way as in Reggio schools. We can thus write the ccomments from our children, taking photos of them doing, and display them in the different rooms of the house - abundantly or sparingly, depending on what suits us.

3. We can also create spaces - fixed like variables. We can decide to integrate these spaces into specific rooms of the house, which correspond to the desired atmosphere (like a reading or concentration corner in the living room if it is rather quiet).

Conversely, we can designate a place in the house as the one hosting different types of activities, which will be arranged there according to the moment, quite flexibly to easily switch from one activity to another without having to move bulky objects or furniture - a piece of furniture with shelves or drawers in the bedroom for example, with shelves and drawers dedicated to certain types of objects, toys, games or a versatile piece of furniture, like an evolving desk for example, which can be used as storage furniture, a step stool, or a market stall as desired.

4. For Loris Malaguzzi, materials also play an important role. They reflect "real life »: natural and everyday, and all the objects and resources that make up the environment are arranged in an attractive, imaginative and/or serious way.

Depending on our means, our interior decoration, our tastes, some materials like wood will be preferred, but it is the invitation by the material to the activity, its ability to generate this that Malaguzzi described as wonder, amazement, which will lead them to seek to understand, to lead them to new discoveries.

And in parallel, it will be a challenge for us to continually seek what will trigger their questions and desire to understand. Through dedicated spaces, we can offer a context. For example, if we offer charcoal pencils or watercolor to our child, rather than putting them away with the pencils and paint or giving them the box to open, we can arrange them on a table with some paper, so that they are surprised to find them there and discover these new things.

IV. Reggio Emilia: An Art of Living as a Family

The Reggio pedagogy offers children many opportunities to learn, and requires our share of them oobserve, to be creative to awaken their curiosity and adapt the activities we offer them to their interests, to invest our time to support them in their projets, selon les ressources humaines, matérielles et temporelles dont nous disposons.

En fonction de nos enfants, notre contexte et nos possibilités, certains de ces outils sont plus facilement implémentables que d’autres, et nous pouvons nous en inspirer, comme nous pouvons chercher dans d’autres pédagogies actives des façons de contribuer au mieux à leur développement.

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