Beautiful Stuff!: Learning with Found Materials

If you are working with early childhood are children, this book is a wonderful resource! I plan to put many of the ideas into practice. Teaching kids to see beauty in common objects is an important lesson along with the idea that art can be created from anything.

I am not a teacher and I was not experienced in the Reggio Emilia approach to preschool education (project approach) before reading this book. I sought this book for handwork ideas with the items my girls collect on their nature walks. I could not put this book down!Beautiful stuff outlines the projects developed with found materials at the pre-school in Reggio Emilia, Italy. It starts at the beginning with the ideas of the teachers, the method of including parents and increasing children's awareness of everyday objects. (This book is full of details - they mention how the teachers scan materials and remove inappropriate / dangerous materials).The book is filled with photographs from beginning to end. The photographs themselves show the story. I especially like the different approaches to sorting suggested in this book and the amount of time the children were permitting to sort, touch, feel, enjoy, and organize the materials. I also liked the three-dimensional project where the children first drew what they were going to build.The children are quoted throughout the book. The quotes are memorable and sweet and show the children's enjoyment of this entire project.I would recommend this book to pre-school teachers, day care centers, people who baby-sit in their home or parents looking for ideas for found objects. I loved it!

This book is a great way to ease yourself into Reggio or to inspire others on your team. You do not have to be "Reggio inspired" to know that young children love small, collectable items. They find such wonderful treasures, but classrooms are not often set up to make good use of this "Beautiful Stuff". This book has great photos and easy to read text showing readers the process that children and staff went through in developing this long term project. I particularly enjoyed the summaries at the end of each chapter on what the adults learned during the process. My only complaint would be that I wanted MORE!

If you are a Reggio inspired teacher as I am, you will love this book. It takes you through the wonderful process of sharing the joys of all those little treasures that young children find and love. You will be amazed at how clever the children in your class become at sorting and classifying through the kinds of experiences that working with 'Beautiful Stuff' involes. I just love this book, it has changed the way I view the materials that I put out for the children, and how I use them. My friends also love this book and all ask, "where did you get it?" Thank you Cathy Topal Weisman and Lella Gandini you are inspiring.

In Beautiful Stuff!: Learning With Found Materials, Cathy Topal and Lella Gandini collaborate to share how real teachers in Reggio Emilia, Italy use ordinary and diverse materials found in any home to stimulate their student's imaginations, inspire storytelling and interactions between children, and serve to launch children into such creative activities as drawing, collage making, sculpture, and construction. Beautiful Stuff! is a marvelous, practical, inspiring, and easy-to-read compendium of ideas and suggestions for nurturing the innate creative of a child and adapting within the context of a classroom.