Curtis – invitations  

I talk about invitations and you know, the Reggio folks say provocation but I never liked that word because to provoke is not as friendly as invite. [laughs] So, I changed it to meet my own point of view. But I get the idea of provocation that it’s important to insight interest but to me I want to invite it. So, it’s this huge part of what I do. I’m like-I’m a thrift store junky, it’s like kind of scary, that I need to stop finding things because I don’t have anywhere to put things anymore.  

But I think about children and that’s really where it comes from and the ways that I’ve seen children use open ended materials, loose parts or even stuff that people invented for them that what they invented isn’t what children necessarily find useful. Like that plastic fruit and vegetable stuff, there’s nothing to do with that but throw it and squish it, right? There’s nothing interesting to do with it. 

I collect interesting things, I offer them in beautiful ways and then I see what children do. I think about Friedrich Frobel, I’ve studied his work a lot. He’s been described as the inventor of Kindergarten. And he had what he called the gifts, Frobel’s gifts. And he very carefully chose materials for children to play with to learn from. And he picked things from nature for them to explore and from human endeavours of architecture and organizing things. And they’re just beautiful and he has this whole philosophy under it that when children actually have their hands on something and do something to construct and build and represent, they learn more. 

So, I love that idea of gifts- that I want everything I offer children is a gift. And when you think about offering a gift, you think about, I think about anyway, something I want to give somebody that I know they’ll like. So, it’s like this mutuality and then when you offer a gift you don’t just put it in a brown paper bag or throw it on the table. You wrap it in this really beautiful way and you even have a bow or maybe a note. And so I think about that when I offer children materials, how can I offer it in a beautiful way, something I know they’ll love. 

And then the best part about giving a gift to someone is you can’t wait to see what they do. And that’s how I feel about what I offer children. So, to me it’s a great metaphor for I always play with everything that I get for kids because I want to see what are the possibilities and then when I watch them they always surprise me. 

I think about Froebel and his idea of gifts and then I love Montessori’s idea of -she was really careful about how she offered and helped children see what there was to do. And I think that’s really important, that there’s this way that children see the world. They take in so much information that the way we jumble things and we have all these shelves stuffed with stuff and primary colours everywhere. 

If you know this thing about their brain is that it’s really flexible and they take in all this information and then we surround them with blah, blah, blah, blah. They’re crazy- it’s no wonder they’re crazy all day and they’re exhausted and they fight and all those things that we complain about in early childhood. So, I want to think about how am I offering, how am I setting up a space, how am I offering the materials so that it shows children what’s available and some possibilities? 

So, I always think about it how do I frame something, whether it be on the carpet in the block area -I’ll put a platform so that it draws your eye and it helps you see, here’s a place to focus. And children really respond to that because there’s a whole other thing about schema theory and enclosure and they want to put their bodies inside things, so to have that platform. I’ll have trays for materials so that it defines the space. It doesn’t mean – I mean Montessori goes a lot further in that you have to stay in this space to do it and I don’t go that far but I think it’s great to start out with- here’s this little space, here’s the things on it, see what you can do. And then the combinations of materials that you offer; I use Piaget’s theory of kinds of play where I think about how many possibilities are in this collection. So, he talks about sensorimotor exploration, like what possibilities are for that here. So you might offer Play-Doh, right, and that’s your sensory base and then you think about what opportunities are there for their building and constructing in the Play-Doh.  So I offer twigs or sticks or sushi mats to make enclosures, so children can do that work or gems or beads or buttons to make designs in the Play-Doh. And then I might offer a little few little animals or people to go in there. So, you have these layers of possibility in this one invitation for children to like, be able to focus but still have what their brain longs for, new things and new ways to use something. So that’s how I think about invitations.