About Fantasy Station Academy

Fantasy Station Academy: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Learning is a private Preschool, for children ages 1 to 5 years of age, located in the city of Margate, Florida. Our main goal is offering high quality education and care in a non-biased environment with plenty of group and individualized attention.

The Fantasy Station Academy name has existed in the field of Early Childhood Education for over 15 years. Our program is accredited by the Green Apple Accreditation and a proud member of the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance (NAREA); Our program has also been designated a Gold Seal by the Department of Children and Families’ Gold Seal Quality Care Program.

We accept all Florida Office of Early Learning programs such as School Readiness & Voluntary Pre-Kindergarten.

About Our Campus

Our facility has been specially designed to meet the needs of children from Toddles to School Age. Here your child will be in an age appropriate environment. All areas, including bathrooms, sinks, water fountains, and furniture are designed with every child in mind. Our outdoor area was designed to cater to the children’s development as well as provide a source of joyful, healthy fun. We also believe in incorporating nature into our daily activities to inspire an appreciation for the environment. Each of the classrooms is set up with learning centers that are designed to create interaction, autonomy, curiosity, and exploration. These centers, as well as the environment overall, will change and evolve according to the various projects that each classroom will be studying. The possibilities for learning are endless in these centers, as they are filled with age appropriate toys, games, and activities to facilitate learning.
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The Reggio Emilia Philosophy of Education

The Reggio Emilia approach to education was created in the city of Reggio Emilia, Italy and it is based on the philosophy that children must have some control over the direction of their learning, they must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, and observing, they have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that they must be allowed to explore, and they must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves. The philosophy also places great emphasis on the principals of respect, responsibility, and community through exploration and discovery in a supportive and enriching environment based on the interests of the children.

The Reggio Emilia approach changes how we present children with the information we want them to learn to that it is intuitive and exciting for them. Children have a natural-born curiosity to understand the world around them and their place in it; we look to inspire children, using that natural-born curiosity, to explore new things, experiment, and make discoveries versus hand-feeding them information. Teachers will work with children to solve problems and create conclusions together instead of solving it for them.

A typical interaction between a child and a Reggio Emilia teacher might go something like this:

Child: Teacher, how do i tie my shoes?

Teacher: How do you think a shoe is tied?… Let’s work on this together until we find the answer we are looking for.

This unique approach to education has gained worldwide renown over the years and continues to be documented as a great success for the education of not just the children, but the adults around them as well.

We welcome parents to ask us questions about Reggio Emilia and/or do more research on their own. We firmly believe in the many benefits of the Reggio Emilia philosophy and happily supply as much educational material as we can find.

Further reading on the Reggio Emilia Approach to Education can be found below:

Reggio Children North American Reggio Emilia Alliance Wikipedia

Below is a poem written by the founder of the Reggio Emilia philosophy, Loris Malaguzzi, that beautifully conveys the roles of imagination and discovery play in early childhood education.

No way. The hundred is there.
The child
is made of one hundred.
The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking
A hundred always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling, of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.
The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.

The school and the culture
separate the head from the body
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.
They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine
They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.
And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.