The Reggio Emilia Approach

The Reggio Emilia Approach was founded by Loris Malaguzzi (1920-1994) in a city in northern Italy, called Reggio Emilia. It was developed to meet the needs of the children below six in municipal child-care and education programs. The Reggio Emilia Approach was hailed as the best preschools in the world by Newsweek magazine in 1991. Today, the Reggio Emilia Approach is adopted in many countries in the world like USA, UK, New Zealand, Australia and so on.

In Amazing Kids Literacy Centre, we aspire to benchmark ourselves against the preschools which adopt the Reggio Emilia Approach. We visited a total of seven early literacy centres in Australia and New Zealand. We looked at the physical set up of the literacy centres, the learning materials used, the activities, the daily schedules and students' works. Interviews with the directors and teachers were carried out to probe for details on the implementations of the Reggio Emilia Approach in their early literacy centres. Class observations were conducted to observe the children's learning and teacher/child interactions.

Amazing Kids Literacy Centre is founded based on the findings of our research. Generally, our findings showed that the Reggio Emilia Approach had the following features:

1. The learning environment serves as a third teacher
2. Children learn in multiple ways
3. Children are assessed through documentation
4. Children's learning are enriched through creative projects based on their interests and abilities
5. The teacher plays the role of a researcher, always learning alongside the children and reflecting about their teaching and learning
6. Home/school partnership is fostered through family centred activities

As a research-based centre, we will continue to keep abreast of the current theories and practices in early literacy learning to provide quality literacy programs for your children.