finding our way to the studio

Pre-school hasn't really started yet, but each class k-8 has had an introduction to the studio, which began with a reading of the Hundred Languages of Children by Loris Malaguzzi. I never truly felt the poem until I decided to discuss it with all of the children, but it is really quite powerful. First graders wondered if the part where "they steal 99, the school and the culture" was about mean people. Second graders liked to think about feeling joy and excitement every day at school, not just at holidays. Middle-school students agreed that school should not "separate the head from the body", and that students should be free to move, run and play games.

Here are a few pictures from this week
-the second grade

                            ...and 4th and 5th graders mapping the sounds we could hear around us

And the poem, by Loris Malaguzzi

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 speak
to understand without joy
to love and 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!