The Envrionment as a Third Teacher

By Miss Kerri Ann
In the Reggio Emilia classroom, we often talk about the environment as a third teacher.  We spend a lot of time choosing classroom materials and deciding how to decorate in a way that promotes development and learning.
In this picture, Daniel uses this number poster to teach himself to quantify objects.  He went through the entire poster counting objects 1-20 (not all correctly, but that's ok).  Then, he spent several more minutes tracing the numbers on the poster.  Peter is standing just outside of the picture watching and correcting Daniel.  After Daniel was done, Peter repeated the activity.  Miss Christa and I did not get involved, we chose to simply observe.  Sometimes the children can learn just as much from the environment and from each other as from us!