An Italian Import for Early Education Washington Preschool Adapts the Reggio Approach, Whereby Teachers Take Their Lead from Kids' Activities

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WHAT would preschoolers do if they suddenly found a plump, purple eggplant on the table? The staff at the Model Early Learning Center (MELC) in Washington, D.C., hoped they would dive for their crayons. Instead, the children barely glanced at the eggplant.

"Oh, they drew a bit, but there was no excitement around it," the head teacher, Sonya Shoptaugh, recalls. So the staff changed tack. Before school opened, they filled a bowl with lemons and hung three more from the ceiling.

That did it. The sight was both familiar and unusual enough to spur six three-to-five-year-olds to draw, paint, and reproduce the lemons in papier-mache; to smear them with paint and roll them …