Powerful Children: Understanding How to Teach and Learn Using the Reggio Approach (Early Childhood Education Series)

''Ann Lewin-Benham recognized the power of the Reggio Approach early on, and has done as much as any American to bring it to the attention of educators....those interested in learning about documentation, assessment, projects, and group learning, in the Reggio mode, will receive an excellent introduction here.'' --From the Foreword by Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of Education

''Ann Lewin-Benham has given us a wonderful account of the famous Reggio Emilia schools: a book that is inspiring, theoretically suggestive, and practical all at the same time. More than ever we need to re-think what kind of schooling works, and Powerful Children is a great contribution to that discourse.'' --Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Psychology and Management, Claremont Graduate University

In Possible Schools, Ann Lewin-Benham showed us that we can create schools that engage the minds of children and involve parents, even in urban settings. In this book, she describes projects in a school that successfully adapted the Reggio Approach with Head Start-eligible children. She explains how to use the Reggio Approach to address current major concerns in early education, including helping children become self-disciplined, making sure children are ready for 1st grade, assessing children s progress, and laying a foundation for literacy. Presenting a multitude of examples of excellent preschool practice, this dynamic book introduces the concept of ''significant work'' that draws deeply on young children's innate intelligences, provides teachers with an opportunity to reflect on what they know and understand about young children, illustrates how teachers can make changes in their classrooms to expand and improve learning, describes robust activities from an urban preschool, including how each project relates to a particular teaching principle, and suggests more clearly defined standards and lays out policy implications for each.