Where it comes from
The approach grew out of the city of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy in the years after the Second World War. It is associated above all with Loris Malaguzzi, the educator who shaped its early decades. The first municipal preschool opened in 1963. Today, Reggio Children, the international body based in the city, runs the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre, where educators travel from around the world to study the approach in its home context.
Our director Tina joined the Reggio Children Study Group at the Centre in April 2025. The visit shaped how she thinks about documentation, the studio, and the small daily decisions about how a classroom should be set up. The conversation, in Reggio Emilia itself, is about half a century old. Most of us are still catching up.
An image of the child
Reggio educators often start by talking about the image of the child. Not what children should become, but what they already are.
The Reggio image is of a child who is competent. Curious. Already full of ideas about how the world works. Children are not empty vessels to be filled with information. They are researchers, in the proper sense of the word: they notice things, they form theories, they test those theories.
This sounds abstract, but it changes the everyday in concrete ways. An educator who sees the child this way slows down. They ask why before they explain. They let a question sit. They watch what the child does next. The phrase Loris Malaguzzi used was the rich child. As in, the child is already rich, before we add anything.
The hundred languages
Malaguzzi wrote a poem called The Hundred Languages of Children. The line everyone quotes is that the child has a hundred languages, but the school and the culture steal ninety-nine.
What he meant was practical. Children think in many ways at once. They think in clay. They think in paint. They think in wire and shadow and dance and storytelling and movement. Most of those languages get switched off too early, in favour of words on paper.
A Reggio-inspired classroom keeps the languages alive. If a child is interested in how celery drinks coloured water, the response is not just a verbal explanation. It is jars of coloured water, real celery, watercolour paints to draw what they see, blocks to build a model of the plant. Same idea, told several different ways.
The environment as the third teacher
The third teacher is a phrase you hear a lot in Reggio settings. The first teacher is the family at home. The second is the educator in the room. The third is the space itself.
That sounds poetic until you spend a morning in a thoughtfully prepared classroom. A studio with paint trays and brushes laid out invites painting. A reading corner with a soft rug invites reading. A vegetable garden by the back door invites a small daily ritual. Materials at the right height. Real things to use, not plastic versions of real things. Light let in.
For us, the third teacher is also the yard. A large outdoor space at the back of our centre, with mature gum trees, a sandpit, a worm farm, and a vegetable garden the children look after. Most days the children are outside more than they are in. The space is doing some of the teaching for us.
What a day actually looks like
Three real examples from our centre, all caught on the way past:
Celery in jars. One Tuesday the children put celery stalks into jars of coloured water and watched, over an hour, the colour climb the leaves. The next morning they were drawing what they had seen, in watercolour. Two languages, same observation.
The Foot Book. After reading the Dr Seuss book, the children spent the week paying close attention to feet. Walking, balancing, wiggling, drawing footprints. The educators called it a hundred ways of moving, a hundred ways of expressing.
Potion station. A wooden table set with droppers, jars, dried petals, frozen flower ice cubes. Children mix, predict, change their minds, mix again. The provocation, in Reggio language, is on the table. The children take it where they take it.
Reggio vs Reggio-inspired
You will see two phrases used in Australia. Reggio. And Reggio-inspired.
Strictly speaking, only the municipal infant-toddler centres and preschools of the city of Reggio Emilia in Italy are Reggio. Reggio Children, the body that holds the approach internationally, does not franchise. It does not certify schools elsewhere as Reggio.
Educators outside Italy who have trained in the approach, who attend study tours, who follow the documentation practice, generally describe their work as Reggio-inspired. That is the honest description. It is what we use. It is also what to look for. A centre using the word Reggio without qualification is either being sloppy with terminology, or making a claim that no one in Italy would back.
How to tell if a centre is genuinely Reggio-inspired
If you are touring preschools in Sydney and a centre describes itself as Reggio-inspired, here is what to look for in the actual environment.
Documentation on the walls. Photographs of children working through a problem, with the educator's notes. A project unfolding over weeks, not a finished craft pinned up on Friday afternoon.
Real materials. Glass jars, real paint, real wood, real plants. Not exclusively plastic. Not exclusively bought online.
An atelier or studio space. Even a small one. A place set up for the languages of art, with materials at child height.
The educator can talk about a current project. Not a theme. A project. With a question the children are working on. With a sense of where it might go next.
The space does some of the teaching. You should be able to walk in and see, before anyone speaks, what the children are interested in this week.
About our St Ives kindergarten
St Ives Chase Kindergarten is a small, Reggio-inspired centre on a quiet street in St Ives Chase, with a generous outdoor yard under mature gum trees. Forty children, ages 2.5 to 6. Two classrooms. Open 7am to 6pm.
Tina, our director, trained at the Loris Malaguzzi International Centre in Reggio Emilia in 2025. We are happy to talk through what the approach looks like in our daily work, including with families who are still working out whether Reggio is the right fit for them. The best way to see it is to come in. Book a tour.