Where Reggio Emilia Meets PYP Inquiry: Foundation Years

It is Tuesday morning in the Foundation Years science lab. On one table there are pictures of flowers, seeds and fruit. There are trays with a selection of different coloured and sized seeds, beans, tweezers and egg cartons for sorting. On the third table there are crayons and paper for documentation, and in the outdoor area small containers with soil, seeds, a water spray bottle and pipettes.  Today’s learning experience for Nursery 2 carries out the question: Where do plants come from?  No one has told the children what is supposed to happen. Children are encouraged to explore the variety of seeds and hypothesise what they are, where they come from, can they hear anything inside, what could it be, can we open it and how.

Starting from a capable child

Since last year, the Foundation Years team has been training in the Reggio Emilia approach. The approach began in the Italian city of the same name after the Second World War and was shaped by the educator Loris Malaguzzi. Its central idea is simple and demanding: the child is curious, capable and competent, able to build knowledge rather than receive it passively.

Two consequences follow. Projects and inquiry become the core of the educational process. And pedagogical documentation, the portfolio, becomes a tool for understanding how each child thinks, not just a record of what they produced. Malaguzzi described children as having “a hundred languages”: drawing, building, movement, conversation, play. Documentation is how teachers learn to read them.

Why Reggio Emilia and the PYP fit together

St PETER’S is an IB World School, and Foundation Years sits within the Primary Years Programme. Reggio Emilia is not a replacement for the PYP. The two share a common understanding of how young children learn. Both see the learner as an active participant. Both are constructivist, placing inquiry at the heart of learning. Both treat the environment as part of pedagogy, so that learning is always rooted in a context. And both position the teacher as a guide who proposes experiences and observes thinking, with the process mattering more than the final product.

What Reggio adds is a particular attention to the space itself. Reggio educators often speak of the environment as a third teacher: a place that should invite curiosity, order, cooperation, art and beauty. That is why our classrooms are being redesigned to reduce visual noise, and why teachers plan learning contexts deliberately rather than decorating them.

Body and wellbeing come first

At this age, self-regulation, emotional development and the connection between movement and wellbeing are not extras. They are among the main ways we monitor each child’s progress. This is why Personal, Social and Physical Education (PSPE) plays a central role, combining motor development, mindfulness, and Physical Education. Throughout the day, the tutor remains the foundation on which each child’s development is supported and followed.

Four areas that give the day its shape

The Science Lab

Lab sessions begin with questions that encourage children to predict, form hypotheses, try alternative answers and meet the scientific method through play. The programme is ambitious because children’s curiosity at this age is a resource worth taking seriously.

Mathematics

Mathematics follows two complementary lines. Innovamat brings a playful, game-based approach to number and reasoning. Alongside it, the school continues to develop its own curriculum, drawing on the British curriculum for rigour and the Australian curriculum for contextualised learning.

Early literacy

Reading is developed through Read Write Inc. Phonics, a systematic programme that moves children through graded levels of difficulty, building both phonic decoding and understanding.

Real-world contexts

Learning also leaves the building. Excursions to the river, sensory activities outdoors and visits such as the bee farm give children real settings in which to ask questions. Units of inquiry, such as our work on recycling, connect what happens in the classroom with the world children already live in.

Expression runs through all of it. When N2 children paint with their feet, they are exploring texture, colour, balance and their own bodies at the same time.

Structure the child does not see

Presented like this, Foundation Years can look like a set of separate programmes. That is not how children experience it. The differentiated objectives and careful planning are not meant to be felt as a series of lessons or topics. They are meant to be absorbed in an integrated way, so that learning becomes natural, transformative and joyful.

That places real demands on teachers. Their work is not only designing and preparing learning, but observing how it unfolds, assessing it and adjusting it continuously.

So when your child comes home and says they “played with water” today, they are telling the truth. They may also have tested a hypothesis, counted, negotiated a turn and found the words to explain what happened. Both descriptions are accurate. Our job is to make sure the second one is always true.