Reggio Inspired

Home Sweet Home seeks partnership with families for Early Childhood Education. The ability to create a learning community is possible only by sharing founding principles and current practices prior to a family's engagement. Through the Alternatives in Action website and our Home Sweet Home Parent Handbook, we have attempted to articulate our point of view of Early Childhood. Parents must have accurate information so they can assess best fit for their child.

Rejecting Perfectionism Young children and their teachers benefit when they learn a work style that includes successive approximations before reaching a final product. These successive attempts can be thought of as editing, and the Reggio Emilia approach offers patterns to help children achieve this style of work. Teachers should strive to free children from the burden of instant perfectionism so that they can instead develop skills in investigation, communication, and creativity. Teachers hold the role of co-researcher, not "the knower of all things". HSH teachers seek to give children, parents and themselves permission to reject perfectionism. The Home Sweet Home Reggio -inspired learning community is about the journey.

Role of the Teacher HSH teachers make intentional decisions during interaction with children. We reflect on what occurs in the environment. Our approach to young children is responsive not coercive. We seek to understand their perspective and learn from it. Teacher behavior is rich and varied along several continua: soft-hard, simple-complex, open-closed, intrusion-seclusion, and high versus low mobility. This cannot be scripted - in working with young children, teachers engage in a gentle dance of give and take that allows the child autonomy, choice and freedom.

Project-based Learning Reggio principles applied in learning communities founded within the American culture often war with the US cultural bias for "faster, better, brighter" and "the one right answer." This can be extrapolated from how some school districts choose to interpret content standards in curriculum and teacher practice as a reaction to increasingly test-driven assessment. In "Democracy and Education," Dewey suggests that when teaching is dominated by specific goals, the educational process becomes static; there is an unnatural separation between the activity the student engages in to reach the goal and the goal itself. Thus, the activity has no educational purpose beyond reaching this goal and does not teach the student how to learn beyond this very specific situation. Dewey suggests instead that education be based on a series of dynamic aims. The aims of the activity emerge from the activity itself, and they serve only as temporary beacons for the activity. As soon as an aim is achieved, that achievement creates activity leading to another aim. Long-term projects, a cornerstone of Reggio practice, can be perfect vehicles for this type of approach to education.

Reggio principles and practices offer a strong commitment to developmentally appropriate practice in a play-based learning environment to meet the needs of the Whole Child and to support physical, social-emotional and cognitive development. These foundational, principle-based practices may look inflexible as there are pieces that are non-negotiable, as altering the practices would violate the principles. As parents have questions around academic next steps for their child, every effort is made to support their understanding of the WHY and the HOW that goes into our work at Home Sweet Home.

The parent-teacher partnership is essential to the successful relationship of a family with Home Sweet Home. HSH teachers are inspired daily by the parent impact through daily interactions, volunteerism and a strong, positive voice. We know the parent is a child's first teacher and the most essential relationship throughout their childhood. Home Sweet Home honors the parent's role and respects the honor parents give our learning community when they choose to engage with us.