A book-game born from an educational project, nurtured through an exhibition, transformed into a shared experience
Context
It all started with a roar. At the Learning by Languages® “27 Febbraio” preschool in Fabbrico, a small town in the province of Reggio Emilia, in Italy, the five-year-old children dedicated an entire year to exploring the world of lions.
The project unfolded through drawings, stories, clay creations, questions, and discoveries—a rich journey full of images, thoughts, and meanings.
From their work emerged a true art exhibition, open to families and the community.
However, that exhibition couldn’t remain just a local experience. The value of what the children produced inspired the Learning by Languages® team to transform it into something more: a book-game that would capture the essence of their journey, extend its reach, and make it accessible beyond the school’s walls.
The result was a product preserving the intelligence and creativity of the children, transforming it into an engaging educational tool.
Each section of the book is inspired by original materials created by the children during the educational project. The activities proposed—including drawing, modeling, observation, photographic storytelling, and even stop-motion—invite adults and children to continue exploring with the same curious and powerful gaze as the young authors of the exhibition
Objectives
- Enhance educational projects by transforming them into accessible cultural content.
- Provide families with tools to play and learn together with their children.
- Experiment with a publishing model in which products are created with and inspired directly by children.
- Offer a tangible example of how observation, documentation, and high-quality pedagogy can generate innovative materials.
- Provide opportunities to support bilingual learning: the book was produced in both Italian-English and Italian-Portuguese versions.
Results
This project is a concrete example of our way of working:
- Promoting a culture of childhood through a publishing product that shares ideas born with children, in real educational contexts.
- Disseminating high-quality educational experiences, with aesthetic appeal and attention to accessibility.
- Promoting children’s creativity and languages, starting from the publication of their creations: drawings, collages, clay sculptures, stories, and multimedia products.
- Extending the impact of the school project, involving families, schools, and communities through the creation of replicable, accessible materials.
Significance
Incredible Roaring Lions, a product in the “Learn&Play” series by Edizioni Junior, represents far more than a well-executed educational project. It’s concrete proof of an approach to designing educational materials deeply rooted in the daily life of early childhood services. It demonstrates how the culture of childhood can generate content, products, and shared visions, while remaining firmly connected to real experiences.
The experiences lived by the children are not merely observed—they become a living resource, shaping tools that truly speak the children’s language. Documentation is transformed into publishing products that preserve children’s voices, authenticity, and ways of expression, making them accessible to other educational and family contexts. Every proposal, page, and detail is the result of an authentic educational relationship, where ideas are born in real contexts, shaped through attentive listening, and transformed into opportunities for play and discovery for other children and families.
Thus, a roar becomes a story, a drawing becomes a workshop, and an exhibition becomes a book. And children’s ideas continue to travel, to spread, and to inspire.
