Documenting Learning in Reggio Emilia: How to Capture the Essence of Play

In the Reggio Emilia approach, documentation is not just about recording events, but about making children’s thinking and creativity visible. Documentation helps educators, families, and the children themselves reflect on their learning, understand their interests, and plan new experiences. It also allows us to value processes that are not always evident at first glance, such as decision-making, spontaneous collaboration, or problem-solving.

Practical tips

• Prioritize intention: documentation should highlight what the child is learning, discovering, or experiencing—not just what they did.

• Combine different media: photos, text, drawings, and real objects help capture the richness of learning.

• Review and reflect: use documentation to plan new activities and reorganize the environment based on the needs observed.

Let’s take construction play as an example. Construction areas are essential spaces in Reggio Emilia education: children experiment with blocks, pieces, and open-ended materials to build, imagine, and explore spatial and geometric concepts. Documenting these experiences makes their thinking and development visible.

While observing children building their city, we can take note of their strategies for balance and shape use. We can also pay attention to how they negotiate roles (“I’ll make the bridge,” “You build the houses”), how they resolve conflicts, or how they incorporate narrative into their constructions (for example, inventing a story around the city). To support this documentation, you can use our templates and resources specially designed for recording construction projects, helping you organize photos, plans, and notes in a clear, visual way.

Strategies for Documentation

Contextualized Photography

• Capture moments of play and exploration as they naturally happen.

• Focus not only on the final product but on the process: how children manipulate materials, interact with peers, and solve problems.

• Visual example: a photo sequence of a child building a tower, showing each stage and the changes in strategy. This allows reflection on trial-and-error, understanding of shapes, and stability.

You can extend the sequence with photos of key moments: when the tower falls, when they try a different base, when a peer suggests a new idea. This reveals mathematical thinking, collaboration, and persistence.

Imagine the children are building a tower that falls repeatedly while they experiment with balance. You can document each attempt using templates designed to capture construction sequences and learning clearly. Find these tools in our shop and bring your observations to life.

Anecdotal Records

• Write down what the child says or does during meaningful moments.

• These notes can be paired with the educator’s interpretation regarding play schemas or emerging interests.

Visual example: a journal page saying, “Martina repeatedly sorts the pieces by size and color,” accompanied by a drawing or photo of the layout.

You can also include snippets of children’s conversations or spontaneous comments that reveal their thinking:
“ If I put the big block on the bottom, it won’t fall,”
“I want this tower to be taller than the other one,”
“This is a bridge connecting the houses.”

Significant silences, gestures, moments of deep concentration, or frustration are also worth noting, as they are essential parts of the learning process.

Play Maps or Schemas

Play maps or schemas are extremely useful for visualizing how children organize space, materials, and their construction ideas. They help identify patterns, interests, and recurring strategies that can later guide planning and environment design.

How can we document through play schemas?

• Draw or photograph how children organize a play space or materials.

• This helps visualize patterns, connections, and recurring strategies.

Visual example: a layout of the construction area showing stacked wooden block towers, a “river” of blue pieces marking boundaries, miniature houses, and animal figures. Add arrows to indicate children’s movements and connections between structures, showing how they interact and collaborate.

You can also use colors to mark different actions: sorting areas, building zones, dialogue areas. This helps detect dominant interests: verticality, symmetry, transport, enclosure, boundaries…

Brief notes can accompany the map:
“Ana uses the large blocks for the base,”
“Juan combines pieces by color preference,”
“They try several times until the tower stands.”

Project Portfolios

• Collect photos, drawings, notes, and the child’s reflections in a single folder.

• This shows how ideas and learning evolve over time.

Visual example: a project titled “We build a city,” documenting everything from the first sketch to pretend-play scenes, from early block experiments to complex structures like bridges and towers.

You can also include transcripts of audio recordings, miniature models, or “traces of the process” such as plans, drafts, or discarded attempts. These elements reveal how the child transforms ideas and acquires new skills.

Murals and Panels

• Create visible spaces in the classroom that display learning processes.

• They allow documentation to be shared with other children and families.

Visual example: In the case of construction, murals can focus on themes such as:

• Shapes and geometry: highlighting squares, rectangles, triangles, and how they combine.

• Balance and stability: showing towers falling and being rebuilt, with comments on strategies to keep them standing.

• Urban planning: illustrating how children envision and build a city, connecting streets, plazas, and buildings.

You can add QR codes with short videos, children’s drawings explaining their structure, and educator notes describing the origin of the idea and possible next steps.

Panels can also include children’s comments and the educator’s reflections.

Commented Audiovisual Documentation

Audio or video recordings capture nuances of learning that often go unnoticed: tone of voice, silence, motor coordination, peer negotiation, or the way a child explains an idea while building.
The key is not just to record, but to select short fragments and analyze them, transforming them into a tool for reflection for educators, families, and children.

• Record brief video clips (30–60 seconds) for easy review.

• Add partial transcripts to highlight key ideas, hypotheses, or spontaneous mathematical language.

• Include a brief educator interpretation linking what is observed to possible interests or play schemas.

Example in the construction area

Visual example:
You record a moment where three children try to build a bridge that doesn’t hold. In the video you hear:

Júlia: “It falls because this is too heavy.”
Amir: “Put a longer one here, look.”
Elena tries a piece and says: “This one is stronger.”

After the video, you can add:

Short transcript:
“The children compare the size and weight of the blocks to find stability.”

Educator interpretation:
“The group begins to use comparative language (‘longer’, ‘stronger’), showing an emerging interest in the physical properties of materials. This suggests that offering blocks of different weights and materials could extend their exploration.”

Planning reflection:
“Set up an exploration table with wooden, cardboard, and plastic blocks to investigate resistance and stability.”

This type of documentation reveals complex cognitive processes that may not be visible in photos or quick notes.

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Documentation in the construction area makes visible how children think, experiment, and collaborate as they create structures. Through process-focused photos, anecdotal notes, short conversation transcripts, and maps that show how they organize the space, educators can interpret strategies such as balance, shape comparison, decision-making, and problem-solving. This material not only helps us understand each child’s interests and play schemas, but also guides the planning of new proposals, enabling educators to offer more challenging materials, reorganize the environment, and better support children’s learning.