DOUBLE TAP TO ZOOM WITH PHONE OR TABLET Foreword by Carolyn Pope Edwards From the very beginning, curiosity and learning refuse simple and isolated things: they love to find the dimensions and relations of complex situations. —Loris Malaguzzi, The Hundred Languages of Children: Narrative of the Possible In an earlier article, I suggested that projects combine two things that toddlers love dearly: play and investigation. Now, after reading Todd Wanerman’s book, I would add expression to that set of what is nearest and dearest to toddlers’ hearts. From Handprints to Hypotheses: Using the Project Approach with Toddlers and Twos is about project-based arts education. The book explains the aims and methods of such an approach and, better yet, takes us inside to see how it might unfold from day to day. It illustrates one North American educator’s personal inter- pretation of a Reggio-inspired pedagogy for toddlers with abundant detail and helpful images. Thus, the book suggests one way to implement a project-based arts education—focusing on children’s emerging expressive capacities—taking children on a developmental journey from their earliest explorations of mate- rials, where concepts are organized around their perceptions and actions, to long-term inquiries that spring from an idea or question about the materials or about what can be understood through work with materials. The book and all the stories and vignettes presented also make a strong case for why it even makes sense to undertake “projects” with this age group—that is, why it makes sense to engage them in group learning that requires organizing, nego- tiating, and collaborating and that calls on them to look forward and backward as they work together. All too often, the curriculum for children this age (twelve to thirty-six months) involves simple activities and experiences that come and go with no deep or necessary connection from one to the next. Perhaps because children under three are so obviously immersed in the immediate moment and in the process rather than the product of their activity, teachers and providers may think that they should develop their curriculum without planning emergently COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL ix