Projects

At Kaleide, children can work individually, or collaborate within a group in a series of projects. Our facilitators do not teach subjects as such (unless the children ask for conventional-type lessons or the pedagogical team deems it necessary to devote time to a particular subject or skill). We work mainly through trans-curricular projects encompassing a variety of skills and contents. All traditional subjects, such as Art and Design, Computing, Technology, Geography, History, Music, etc., are embedded in projects which evolve according to the children's interests and their developmental stage.

We see a good project as having these characteristics:

• interesting and authentic: children will take an interest, the project will make sense, make connections with their lives and those of their community;

• transparent: the intention or meaning of activities associated with the project are readily apparent, children will be able to become deeply involved, at their own level of complexity, over long periods of time;

• challenging: children will be encouraged to engage and persist with challenge, difficulty, uncertainty and puzzlement; in long-term projects children will become familiar with different kinds of problems and their possible solutions, and will return to problems of previous days;

• multi-faceted: children can incorporate and improve their particular talents and “languages”: for colour, design, technology, three-dimensional modelling, reasoning, drawing, social interaction, number and measure, etc.;

• collaborative/accessible: children will collaborate and “bounce ideas off each other”, and will be keen to share their knowledge with their peers within an open culture that values mutual inspiration.