Beautiful Stuff

by Cathy Weisman Topal and Lella Gandini

Inspired by educational practices in Reggio Emilia, Italy, this book focuses on process rather than product. Chapters cover collecting and organizing materials, stimulating thoughts about design, reflecting upon and extending work, and more. Several sorting and categorizing activities are presented, along with individual and group projects and constructions.

Encourage your kids to express their creativity as they discover, collect, sort, arrange, experiment, and think with found and recyclable "stuff." The real-life experiences of teachers and children will inspire ideas that you can try at home: choose objects and turn them into a display, transform materials into a face, build and glue wood scraps to make constructions. Appropriate for children four years of age and older.

Cathy Weisman Topal has been an art teacher for over 20 years. She teaches three- to eight-year-olds at the Smith College Campus School, and also teaches art education at Smith College. She is the author of Children, Clay, and Sculpture and Children and Painting.

Lella Gandini is an author, a correspondent for the Italian early childhood magazine Bambini, and adjunct professor in the School of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She serves as Reggio Children Liason in the United States for Dissemination of the Reggio Emilia Approach. Published in 1999 by Davis Arts. Hardcover 96pp.