The intention is to describe a research and education project in art and with art in the 3-5 year age group. The setting is the school "Dalla parte dei bambini" based in Naples, Italy, which for more than thirty years has used various artistic forms as a pedagogical tool, in the belief that the child is a reflective and active subject.
Specifically, the researcher followed a group of 5-year-old children, in a period clearly marked by the material and immaterial consequences that the health emergency entails in life and in everyone, in families, in school, in Social relations. In this complex framework, in which the issues of presence and absence, of beginning and end seem to loom in every corner, educators have imagined an educational project that can change as the conditions of possibility change and that, at the same time , remains solid and full-bodied in its objectives strongly connected with its pedagogical principles.
During this phase of growth, children use increasingly complex thinking that goes in the direction of conceptual thinking, categories that are progressively broader and not necessarily concretely perceptible. His interest begins to go in the direction of the search for solutions, in the discovery of constants that regulate processes, in the planning of actions and in the hypotheses about possible results.
The attention becomes more and more refined and its times lengthen considerably, the categories of time and space begin to have a real meaning in everyday experience.
The didactic project, therefore, was developed around the great theme of Time and its dimensions, focusing on the great theme of Space and all its possible declinations. Space was considered both in its most intimate sense of individual space, a space for only one in which to write personal history, and in its topological sense linked to orientation, distances, measurements, explorations, and understood as space-world, from an ecological point of view.
A project that used maps was born. Specifically, he started from a map of the school itself, which was studied in its directions; divided the space into groups of geographers has been redesigned on a larger scale. This process of scale translation is something that trains cognitive reasoning to the possibilities of writing: lowercase letters that form words, that form sentences in a given space / sheet.
The next step was to go to the discovery of the open spaces of the school itself, in particular in the courtyards, on the stairs, on the terraces; following the arrows and numbers that lead to the different environments, which are carriers of messages and indications that must be read and decoded like a map of pirates whose treasure is knowledge.
Once at the top, the group of boys and girls immersed themselves in the wonder of the city, outlining their gaze towards four horizons that proliferated in front of them: Vesuvio, San Martino, the Spanish Quarter, the great dome on the left and they to the center.