Criteria for the Use of Internal School Resources (Facilities, Equipment, Laboratories)

During growth and learning phases, the brain must be stimulated by sensory experiences within a rich and varied environment; the child must therefore see, touch, hear, taste, smell, play, explore, and experiment. The school’s spaces, as a whole, provide sensory richness and depth. Divided into mini ateliers equipped for experimentation and manipulation of various materials, they allow for multiple activities and enable high-quality exploratory and constructive moments. These spaces communicate industriousness, creative tension, and fascination, creating the conditions for what Bruner described: the child adopting the attitude of a scientist, experimenting, researching, and discovering knowledge independently.

The great importance of play in a child’s life is now universally recognized, although the meaning of play is still widely debated. Play is significant not so much as a trace of what has occurred (the past), but because it expresses the way the child engages with and interprets the experiences they are immersed in—the beginning of the greatest game of all: life itself. Through play, the child draws from the depth of their being the most genuine stimuli for development. Play is the essential manifestation of childhood and characterizes all of a child’s activities. It is through play that the main abilities of the child—sensory-motor, emotional, constructive, expressive, and intellectual—are shaped and developed. Play involves the full and vital participation of the child’s personality.

For this reason, play constitutes the core experience and purpose of all activities at Piccole Orme. The school is equipped with materials that develop balance, fluidity of movement, skills for early artistic expression, constructive manual work, and the first steps toward understanding numerical and spatial relationships. Furniture, various objects, and carefully selected toys, chosen according to precise pedagogical criteria, serve as catalysts for experiments, discovery and role play, sources of surprises, multipliers of social interactions, and tools to perceive and seemingly challenge physical laws. These “enzymes” support and make visible processes of interaction, exchange, experimentation, enjoyment, reflection, and imagination development.

In psychoanalytic theory, fantasy is the child’s first extraordinary resource to confront irrational and unconscious content perceived as threatening, serving a compensatory function for controlling anxiety and managing frustration.

Defined in the curriculum as “the different domains of doing and acting” of the child, the fields of experience, each with its own specificity, establish educational aims, learning objectives, methodological strategies, and assessment tools designed to guide all children—including those with disabilities or disadvantages—toward the development of attitudes and skills. The school’s laboratories offer activities corresponding to these fields of experience, where children’s learning is limitless.

In contemporary society, artificial substitutes often replace—or even dominate—the natural, weakening and dulling children’s intellectual senses and preventing them from establishing a healthy relationship with reality, where wonder and amazement have no space. The school intervenes by creating a natural environment and establishing laboratories or mini-ateliers as fields of experience, where children can act and transform action into experimentation. Experimentation and experience are fundamental elements for moral and intellectual growth, guiding children to decode and internalize the continual changes of reality.

If technological progress has distanced children from nature and impoverished their lives, the school offers spaces and activities that allow children to fully express their personalities and, above all, to develop as autonomous and independent individuals. Piccole Orme is a place of production, knowledge, culture, action, and socio-political experimentation—a kind of “workshop.” Through action, children understand the path of their knowledge, the organization of their experiences and skills, and the meaning of their relationships with others. It is in action, when reflected upon, that the differentiation forming the knowing subject, the known object, and the tools of knowledge is constructed.