In our atelier, inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach, we choose one broad topic each year and allow the children’s questions, discoveries and interests to guide our exploration. This year, our topic is food. This year it all began with a simple question from K1 student, Logan: could we try something sour?
We started with limes and lemons, exploring their taste, smell, colour and texture. From there, we moved towards something a little sweeter, and oranges became our focus for the term. What started as an exploration of taste has opened up a whole world of discoveries, and we are still finding new things to explore.
We look at oranges, touch them, smell them and taste them. We compare their textures, shapes and colours. When we cut them in different directions, we discover different patterns inside. We use magnifying glasses and a microscope to look more closely, finding details that we cannot see with our eyes alone.
But an orange is not just something to look at or eat. What happens to it over time? As we watch our oranges change and decay, we become interested in mould and fungi. This opens up new questions about how things change, what grows on food and how we can use these processes. Our exploration is continuing, and we are now looking towards fermentation…
Art gives us another way to explore oranges. Some children paint directly onto the fruit and notice that the painted surface seems to slow down the decay happening underneath. It also means that the orange can no longer be touched in the same way.
We use fresh orange slices for printing, discovering the patterns they leave behind, and experiment with orange juice as paint. As we squeeze the fruit onto paper, we also listen to the sounds it makes: a soft, wet squelch, a little squirt, and the gentle patter of juice falling onto the paper. For a while, our artwork even keeps the smell of oranges.
The shape of an orange brings another challenge. An orange is three dimensional, with a rounded form that cannot be represented fully on a flat piece of paper. We explore paper folding techniques, trying to find ways to create volume and represent its curves.
As the term progresses, the orange keeps changing in our eyes. It is a fruit to taste, a shape to investigate, a tool for printing, a source of colour and smell, and something that changes over time. Each discovery brings new questions, and each question leads the children somewhere we have not necessarily planned to go.
Our exploration is still unfolding. We do not always know where a question will take us, and that is part of what makes the atelier so interesting. One child’s curiosity can open a door for everyone, turning something as ordinary as an orange into a world of possibilities.