SIS PREP

6 GUIDING PRINCIPLES

• Environment enhances the learning process and encourages children.
• The Piazza and the atelier are the heart of the preschool. Space is designed to encourage encounters, communication and relationships.
• Pedagogy of listening & relationship.
• Listening to children's theories enhances the possibility of discovering how children think and how thy both question and develop a relationship with reality. This possibility is magnified when it occurs within a group context that allows for the experience of others to be shared and debated.
• Reciprocity of children and their multiple languages.
• Children use many forms of symbolic representation: words, movement, drawing, painting, building, sculpture, shadow play, collage, dramatic play, music (the hundred languages). In using many materials as a part of experiential learning, they discover, communicate what they know and understand, what they wonder about, question and imagine.

• Educators are nurturers and guides.
• Educators and artists (atelierista) facilitate children's exploration of themes - short - or long-term projects and guide experiences of open-ended discovery and problem-solving. They know how to plan, observe and listen closely, to children; how to ask questions, discover children’s ideas, hypothesis and theories and provide occasions for discovery and learning.
• Parents are partners.
• A mutually supportive relationship between school and family is critical.
• The value of observation and documentation.
• Documenting children's daily experiences and ongoing projects gives meaning and identity to all that the children do. It is through the observation and documentation that the teachers are able to gain insight into the thoughts of the children, determine further investigation for working on topics, create a history of the work and generate further interest.
• Professional Development.
• Through discussion and interpretation of their own work and the work of the children, educators see themselves as researchers, and engaged in continuous on-going training and theoretical exploration.