INCORPORATING REGGIO EMILIA
Reggio Emilia is an educational philosophy that originated in Reggio Emilia, Italy, over 30 years ago. There, educators and parents worked together to develop full-day infant-toddler centers and schools for young children. They shared the basic premise that all children have a strong potential to enter and explore relationships with peers, teachers and the environment. It is through these relationships that children engage in meaningful learning. Incorporated in this premise is the belief that children are able to make discoveries, place meaning on them and relate them to events in their daily lives.
This inspired approach emphasizes:
- The image of the child: All children have potential, construct their own learning, and are capable.
- Community and system: Children, family, teachers, parents, and community are interactive and working together.
- Interest in environment and beauty: School and classrooms should be beautiful places.
- Collaboration by teachers: Children and teachers are a team—partners working together, sharing information and projects.
- Time not set by the clock: Respect for the children’s pace and time table; children stay with the same teachers for several years and the relationships remain constant.
- Emergent curriculum/projects: Projects and curriculum are child-centered, following children’s interests, returning again and again to add new insights.
- Environmental stimulation: This encourages activity, involvement and discovery, by using a variety of media.
- Documentation: Teachers are observing, recording, thinking and showing children’s learning.
While many of these beliefs are firmly in place at Del Mar Hills Nursery School, we are making efforts to grow in each area. Our teachers are working together to create the most appropriate and stimulating school possible.
ORFF SCHULWERK
Orff Schulwerk is a way to teach and learn music. It is based on things children like to do: sing, chant rhymes, clap, dance and keep a beat on anything near at hand. These instincts are directed into learning music by hearing and making music first, then reading and writing it later. This is the same way we all learned our language.
Orff Schulwerk is designed for all children, not just the privileged, talented or selected few. There is a place for every child and each contributes according to ability.
Orff Schulwerk happens in a non-competitive atmosphere where one of the rewards is the pleasure of making good music with others. When the children want to write down what they have composed, reading and writing find their moment.
Orff Schulwerk uses poems, rhymes, games, songs and dances as examples and basic materials. These may be traditional or original. Spoken or sung, they may be accompanied by clapping and stamping or by drums, sticks and bells.
The special Orff melody instruments include wooden xylophones and metal glockenspiels that offer good sound immediately. Played together as in a small orchestra, their use helps children become sensitive listeners and considerate participants.
Why Is Orff Important In Music Education?
Current research indicates that children need a balance between emotional and intellectual stimulation to develop as healthy human beings. Orff Schulwerk provides this balance through total, active involvement in music making.
Orff Schulwerk is a teaching and learning approach, not a method. Its uniqueness lies in the incorporation of the spoken word with singing, movement and instrument playing as learning tools.
With Orff Schulwerk, improvisation and composition start students on a lifetime of knowledge and pleasure through personal musical experiences.
Some of the Objectives of Orff
- Increase language skills and concepts
- Increase freedom of self-expression
- Development of respect for and acceptance of an individual’s attempts at self-expression
- Increase body awareness
- Development and use of spatial relationships
- Increase skill and ease in functioning as a member of a group
- Development of the ability to accept, understand, and carry out verbal and non-verbal communication: Listening to directions
- Following directions
- Learning to take turns
- Develop verbalization and speech inflection
- Provide an opportunity for exploration of the environment
- Develop and encourage coordination in body movement
- To motivate individual, by helping to channel extrinsic stimuli to intrinsic stimuli
- To provide an acceptable outlet for tension
- Provide a successful, positive musical experience
- To have freedom, fun and enjoyment
- Increase voluntary participation
- Increase independent functioning
- Self identification
The Introduction of Orff
Composer Carl Orff (d. 1982) and his associate Gunild Keetman evolved the basic texts for the Schulwerk as models for teachers worldwide. Now translated into eighteen languages, Orff Schulwerk is based on the traditional music and folklore of each country where it is used. At present, more than 10,000 teachers in the United States have found the Schulwerk the ideal way to present the magic of music to their students.
Orff Training
Intensive, three-level Orff Schulwerk training courses help to prepare teachers and therapists for the challenge of developing music programs adapted to the needs of their students.
For more information on Orff Schulwerk, contact:
FROEBEL PHILOSOPHY
Children have always had an innate ability to play with objects in their environment. In the 1830s, Fredrich Froebel concluded that students who began their education at the ages of seven and eight were already deficient in their ability to learn. When he recognized that structured play of very young children could provide a basis for their formal education, he began devising materials and games for two to six year olds.
In 1840, Froebel officially opened his first kindergarten (“children’s garden”) in Blankenberg, Germany. His creative system of learning through play was so successful that it had spread throughout the world by the end of the 19th century. Parents and grandparents of today’s young children, looking back upon their own preschool and kindergarten years, can recall building with blocks, digging in a sandbox, watching beans sprout, sitting in a circle while the teacher led fingerplays and musical games. All of these were part of Froebel’s original kindergarten, updated to fit into more modern times but maintaining his spirit of learning through doing.
Froebel drew upon many sources to develop the kindergarten system. His curriculum was based upon his own education in the physical sciences and the philosophical beliefs of his time. He observed classes being taught by the revolutionary Swiss schoolmaster, Pestalozzi, who stimulated his students with hands on activities. Froebel noted the loving encouragement Pestalozzi gave to the children instead of rote learning and floggings. This stimulated Froebel to recall as a young child his own frustrations to construct with scraps of wood. This led to the development of sequenced system of building blocks. The kindergarten was also the result of pioneering research in developmental psychology, which Froebel and his colleagues recorded and shared their observations of infants and young children at home and in school.
In the Froebelian kindergartens, children “make the outer inner and the inner out.” This meant that they could assimilate contacts with their environment and then creatively express them in many ways. In his 1997 book, Inventing Kindergarten, Norman Brosterman attributed the great burst of artistic and architectural creativity of early 20th century to the kindergarten backgrounds of Frank Lloyd Wright, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, and others. At Del Mar Hills Nursery School the imaginative play of young children can be observed when we follow Froebel's old maxim: “Come, let us live with our children.”
MONTESSORI
Del Mar Hills Nursery School offers a variety of Montessori equipment and materials. Montessori recognizes in children a natural curiosity and desire to learn. The Montessori materials awaken this desire and channel that curiosity into learning experience which children enjoy. Montessori materials help children to understand what they are learning by associating an abstract concept with a concrete sensorial experience. In this manner, the child is truly learning, not just memorizing. The Montessori materials stress that children learn and progress at their own pace so that fast learners are not held back, and slow learners are not frustrated by their inability to keep up. We value Montessori materials, but do not require our teachers to follow strict Montessori methodology.
©2006 Trump's Del Mar Hills Nursery School. Inc.
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