Garden Gate Projects
Project work allows children to play around with ideas in a concrete way that matches their developmental and intellectual abilities. Children come together in groups to work on projects, building collaborative problem-solving skills as they share ideas and knowledge.
Water Color, Clay, Journal Sketch, Storytelling, Collage, Sculpture, Music, Motion & Movement and more
Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the Reggio Approach, describes the "infinite ways that children can express, explore, and connect their thoughts, feelings and imaginings." It is the belief that there are "multiple ways of seeing and multiple ways of being." At Garden Gate we offer children multiple creative languages through which to explore and develop knowledge.
the 100 languages
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.
- Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)