Engaging Children's Minds: The Project Approach

Now in its third edition, this book shows teachers how to incorporate the Project Approach into early childhood and elementary curricula, engaging children intellectually and heightening their capacities for thinking, hypothesizing, reasoning, and expressing their natural curiosity.

Why has the Project Approach proven to be so successful for engaging young children intellectually and supporting their capacities to think, predict, hypothesize, reason, and express their natural curiosity? Simply put, because project work provides meaningful contexts in which children can readily apply and perceive the usefulness of their growing academic skills. This book provides a brief history and overview of the Project Approach and a thorough explanation of how to better use this method proficiently in a wide range of educational contexts.

This book is intended for teachers, early childhood practitioners, caregivers, and student teachers. Readers will learn how to apply this approach to engage children's interest and facilitate their intellectual development. The book's chapters articulate the processes and benefits of the Project Approach, identify and detail the three phases of project work, and provide specific suggestions for implementing each phase. The importance of documenting children's work to record the story of their investigation and findings is also discussed.

• Presents the philosophical, theoretical, and research bases of project work that serve to explain how the Project Approach enables children to make better, more in-depth and accurate sense of their experiences and phenomena in their everyday environment

• Includes descriptions of numerous projects implemented with children in a wide variety of settings to guide teachers through developing their own successful projects with children

• Provides a comprehensively updated new edition of the well-known standard book on the Project Approach