Beautiful Stuff

Earlier this year, the museum hosted a workshop just for preschool teachers. The workshop was based around the idea and book ‘Beautiful Stuff’ by Cathy Weisman Topal and Lella Gandini. So what is ‘Beautiful Stuff’? It is an artistic process of discovery inspired by the Reggio Emilia teaching philosophy that is great for bringing out the creativity in students young and old. More specifically, the ‘stuff’ can be any small object you think has the potential to be beautiful such as such as old keys, broken toys, ribbons, bottle caps, wood scraps,  shells, etc.

Our guest teachers brought some ‘beautiful stuff’ with them to the museum to share, sort, collect and build. First, each teacher made a composition with the materials he/she brought from home. Next, we all walked around the room together to see what beautiful stuff was brought in and how each person used his/her items. Finally, we came up with some words to describe the categories of objects we saw. Some were action words such as bouncy or springy and some were more descriptive such as shiny or old.

A beautiful stuff composition of 'tiny' things

This category was 'natural things'

Each teacher adopted one of these descriptive words and collected objects from around the room that fit that description. This is how we made our second beautiful stuff composition. Everyone brought their categorized objects back to their seats to create an artwork using just those objects. The results were so interesting! To make sure nobody forgot about the experience or their final composition, each teacher drew his/her composition. The drawing serves as the memory, which is particularly useful if the materials are going to be collected and used again in new ways.

Aside from all this hard work, we got to chat about teaching, enjoy some snacks and learn more about the Reggio Emilia teaching philosophy from guest speaker Barbara White, Akron Summit County Library’s Manager of Branch Libraries, who spent time studying and observing the Reggio Emilia approach in Italy.

Teachers choose words to describe their beautiful stuff

Did you participate in this workshop? If not, can you think of some ways the Beautiful Stuff exercise could be used in your classroom or even with your own children?