Activities

Scientific evidence shows that the first years of life are fundamental for the health and intellectual, linguistic, emotional, and relational development of the child, with significant effects throughout adult life.

Learning the love for reading through a gesture of love: an adult reading a story helps the child acquire language skills and focus attention on stories and books, fostering opportunities for cognitive and emotional development. Weekly, children will listen to a dramatized story, selected based on their developmental and attention abilities, and will create a painting and creative activity based on it.

Art plays a fundamental role in children's education, stimulating the learning of essential activities for the overall development of the individual. 

Very often art has been put aside, as if it were a superfluous activity. Gardner, pioneer of the theory of multiple intelligences, argued that a good educational system must cultivate and promote all forms of intelligence, relating them to artistic intelligence, otherwise one would neglect one of the fundamentals of human potential.

It is important to promote children's passion for art, in all its forms, not only as a means of expression but also as a way to approach the world around them.

Painting and drawing, creating and modeling are basic activities for the biological, educational, and emotional development of the individual, revealing themselves as a spiritual necessity.

These activities contribute to personal development as they offer the opportunity to express one's creativity and self. Artistic production contributes to social development, collaboration, and achieving awareness of the importance of personal contribution to collective work.

Art allows physical development, particularly eye-hand coordination, but also language development since children often talk to us about their artistic production and explain their drawings. 

Finally, art contributes to cognitive development; from drawing one arrives at writing and numbers. The well-known artist Rothko, famous worldwide for his color field paintings, believed that anyone was capable of making art, without innate talent or prior studies. Art is a basic form of expression and is a fundamental part of human experience.

"Making art" is the innate ability to translate one's emotions onto paper, into visual experience, through a language that everyone can understand. Children's expressive ability is powerful, and it is important not to repress the "child artist" with technicalities or conformism. To bring children closer to art, it is necessary to encourage them to experiment: "making art" first with the natural tools the subject has (hands, fingers, body parts), later with materials made available to them (sponges, leaves, fruit), and finally the academic brush will be proposed. According to our very personal idea, a happy child is a free child; the premise is not to teach the child an artistic technique a priori but to help them communicate their self through art, encouraging their spontaneous production.

In the early years of life, knowledge is built through the opportunity to experience materials and objects, through the body and the senses. Sensorimotor thinking relies on motor experiences and sensory perceptions to accumulate data, coordinate them, and internalize them; through manipulation, the child discovers himself, others, and the world of objects by exercising motor coordination mechanisms.

The child needs to explore, manipulate, feel tactile sensations, and take possession of objects to understand their weight, resistance, temperature, and flexibility; all this allows him to discriminate sensations and create a concrete vision of reality.

After his own body and that of his mother, everything becomes manipulative material for the child: food, objects, water, earth, flour.

Manipulation does not necessarily aim to lead the child to produce something; in this case, it is necessary to quote Bruner who states:

“Freed from the tyranny of a goal to be strictly followed, the player can from time to time substitute, elaborate, invent”

The child will be free to experiment and play, protecting him from any frustration. Manipulation helps the child to release tension, improves eye-hand coordination, fine motor development, stimulates creativity, and encourages self-esteem. Together with the children, we will create a mixture of water and flour, salt dough, or baking soda dough, we will let them play freely, explore, and only later and as a consequence of the child's personal intent will jars and objects be made.

From the playful and sensory experience, we will arrive at the creation of a small cooking workshop, we will try together with the children to make bread, pizza, cookies. The children will become little chefs; smell, touch, and taste will be stimulated and they will have fun doing “like the grown-ups”.

The collage is a creative activity through which the child exercises fine motor skills, improving hand-eye coordination. Over time, the gestures they will make will become increasingly precise, coordinated, and orderly.

Through collage, children confront the spatial limits of the paper, then they will test movements using additional tools, brushes, experiment with different materials to glue, learn to distinguish soft objects from hard ones, smooth from rough, thick from thin.

Educating new generations to respect the environment is an increasingly urgent need, because while sustainability is the future, it is also true that achieving it must start in the classroom. Through play and small lessons, we will guide children to respect the environment and reuse resources. We believe in the potential of deconstructed materials: unpredictable and mysterious, they stimulate children's (and adults') creative expression, their curiosity, and divergent thinking, offering many different opportunities to make sense of the world around us.

We will use various recycled materials, those that usually end up in the trash, to build musical instruments, for example. We will make castanets with bottle caps and folded cardboard, maracas with Easter egg cartons, and sound bottles. All these activities aim to raise children's awareness of the possibility of recovering even what is no longer needed and turning it into something different, useful, and nice thanks to the art of making and recycling.

With outdoor education we refer to a wide range of educational practices aimed at enhancing the outdoor environment as an educational setting and a privileged place for training and education for children.

Born in Germany and especially widespread in Northern Europe (Sweden, Norway) in the second half of the twentieth century, Outdoor Education today increasingly influences European pedagogical trends, guiding various outdoor education experiences also in Italy. Experiences in nature offer those who live them the opportunity to grasp the benefits and to face, within the educational group, some typical problematic situations of this process.

If man is part of nature and is energy, even small and concrete actions are enough to feel part of this world by respecting it and seeking harmony with it. The benefits of experiences in nature therefore start from daily gestures and experiences to reach the great goals of sustainable education.

We will promote experiences and activities in contact with nature, guiding children to discover the change of seasons and temperatures, obviously in total safety (appropriate clothing).

The educational garden is an excellent incentive to experience a different way of living the garden, enhancing children's ability to observe and associate, sensory perception, and through the use of small tools of the trade, hand-eye coordination.

This experience will be very useful to develop in children a greater awareness of the environment and will increase their love for nature.

The goal is also to give children the opportunity to have an experience marked by slowness, in contact with the earth and nature, which needs respect for timing, which also has to do with "taking care of...", learning to wait for something to start growing and learning to observe the small daily changes in nature. In the first phase, the children will be shown the seeds and seedlings; then together with them a corner of the garden will be identified where the soil can be prepared for sowing and finally, with the help of the educators, the seeds will be scattered on the soil.

Daily, the children will water their little garden and observe progress and changes.

Exploiting children's natural curiosity combined with their desire to play can help us convey important scientific concepts in the form of play, giving children the opportunity to approach science without getting bored.

Pouring activities, fundamental to Maria Montessori's pedagogy, are important for the little ones because they allow them to concentrate, gradually gain confidence, and exercise hand motor skills. 

During the school year, liquid pouring activities will be considered; here are some examples of pouring with liquids:

You can pour from the jug to the glass and vice versa. The error control in this case is the sponge, which helps the child absorb and collect the spilled water.

Take two bowls, one containing water and the other empty. The child inserts a sponge into the full bowl, then squeezes it and empties it into the empty container.

The child will be invited to transfer the liquid with the dropper from a full container to an empty one and vice versa.

In a tall glass, we will pour some water and some oil, letting it flow along the inner wall of the glass. Then, one after the other, we will add detergent and denatured alcohol (pink). 

We will discover that some liquids sink, positioning themselves under the water, while others remain on the surface. In this way, after a few seconds, we will see the various liquids stratify, forming our colorful tower.

The volcano is a scientific game that children always find very fun. We will fill a bowl with baking soda mixed with red food coloring, then quickly add vinegar or lemon juice. To make the experiment more suggestive and scenic, you can build a cone of soil or sand in the garden and place the bowl with baking soda on its top.

To make the self-inflating balloon, we will put a teaspoon of baking soda inside a balloon and some vinegar in a small bottle. 

We will attach the balloon to the neck of the bottle. When we lift the balloon upright, the baking soda falling into the vinegar will produce gas, which will magically inflate the balloon.

Following the premises and the workshop activities planned for this school year, an educational project has been developed that will guide us through the different phases of our journey. Two important routine activities will be proposed every day throughout the school year:

During the school year, we will be guided to discover the seasons, colors, and emotions by four guide fairies. The first fairy we will meet is Leaf, the autumn fairy.

Leaf arrives when the heat and long daylight hours give way to the first rains and gusts of wind.

Leaf is dressed in colorful leaves: yellow, orange, brown, and red. During sunny days, she loves to play carefree in the woods and under the leaves discovers Hedgehog's den, a chilly little animal who loves to eat chestnuts and pumpkin together with his friend Fox. Leaf, Hedgehog, and Fox have fun playing hide and seek and tag together, but as the days pass, the first rains arrive, the days become shorter, and all this makes Leaf angry.

Leaf's dress suddenly turns all red! All this anger makes her capricious; she doesn't want rules, she doesn't want limitations, but here comes Bianca, the winter fairy, to help her.

Bianca, dressed in snowflakes and ice, explains to her that red is not only the color of anger but a warm color like the fireplace fire that warms the heart, like the affection of family and friends. 

The scent of Christmas is already in the air, and all the houses are tinged with red; it is December 21, and Leaf and Bianca have to say goodbye, the leaves have fallen, some animals are hibernating, Christmas carols can be heard in the distance, and many children are seen writing letters to Santa Claus.

Winter has officially begun, the season of cold and snow. Bianca meets many new friends: the polar bears, Penguin, Reindeer, and they all dance under the snow and dress up for Carnival.

Oranges, apples, walnuts, and many tasty fruits sprout from the orchards. The days pass quickly, the sun begins to be warmer, and the days start to lengthen.

March has arrived, taking away the cold and seasonal fruits; Bianca is very sad because she will have to wait a long time to see her favorite color again, the blue of the evening; but here comes Primula, who drying a tear consoles her and reassures her that she will find her favorite color among the first little flowers that will sprout and in the blue skies of spring. 

The air becomes warmer, and Bianca is ready to say goodbye to Primula, the spring fairy, dressed in flower petals. It is March, and Primula prepares to make a small garden; she enjoys playing outdoors chasing and catching butterflies, ladybugs, and bees. Primula loves taking care of her garden, but suddenly a thunderstorm surprises her, and her dress turns all purple; a very loud thunder scares her.

At that moment, Luce, the summer fairy, arrives and reassures her that it is only water falling from the sky and that the loud sound is just the clash of two gray clouds. Primula calms down and dances in the rain with Luce, happy to have overcome her fear.

The days pass, and Primula and Luce become great friends and dance together in a lovely ring. The heat is at the door, and Luce, dressed in sand and shells, invites Primula to take a nice bath in the sea, but the fairy does not know how to swim, and they say goodbye with the promise to meet again next year.

Luce, the summer fairy, loves to bathe in the sea, build many sandcastles, and collect shells by the sea shore. In the blue sea, she has many little fish friends and joyfully greets the sun while enjoying a slice of watermelon under the umbrella.