The 100 Languages are a metaphor for the extraordinary potentials of children.
The Reggio Emilia Approach emphasizes hands-on discovery learning that allows the child to use all their senses and all their languages to learn.
We believe that children use many different ways to show their understanding and express their thoughts and creativity.
These visual languages, or ways of learning, are used in the construction of thoughts and feelings and are a natural part of the child.
We thus offer daily opportunities to encounter multiple avenues for thinking, developing and expressing their ideas and feelings
Through the use of painting, sculpting, music, science, dancing, construction, storytelling, theater and other forms of self-expression, children are taught to give voice to their thoughts and ideas, as well as to share their newfound discoveries and understandings.
The Hundred Languages
No way. The hundred is there.
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 to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only by the holidays.
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.
-Loris Malaguzzi
Founder of the Reggio Emilia Approach