Barefoot Atelier · West Los Angeles
Children's Gallery
Every piece here was made by a child at our West LA preschool — not a craft kit, not a template. Real art, made by real children, exploring who they are and the world around them.
Schedule Your TourThe Reggio Emilia Approach
Reggio Emilia begins from a single idea: children have a hundred languages — a hundred ways of thinking, wondering, and making sense of things — and art is one of them. Everything you're about to see is a child using that language. A question worked out in paint. A shape pressed into clay. A thought made visible. Less a finished product to admire than a young mind caught in the act of thinking.
Throughout the Year
Every season and celebration becomes another material to think with — hands-on, and led by the children's own questions. Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot bring apple-and-honey painting and homemade sukkah decorations; Hanukkah pairs menorah-making with light-table play; Purim brings masks and costumes; Passover, seder-plate art and symbol-based storytelling. Tu B'Shvat turns us toward trees and leaves, and each spring Yom Ha'atzmaut brings out the blue and white as children paint the Israeli flag.
The secular seasons shape our work too — leaf rubbings and harvest colors as fall arrives. And every Friday a family brings flowers for Shabbat, and the children paint them fresh — the same weekly ritual, new art each week.
A Theme We Return To
Somewhere between two and six, children work through one of the biggest questions of early childhood: who am I, apart from my parents, my siblings, my group? It's when a stable sense of self first takes shape — and Reggio Emilia treats that as something to actively support, built through relationships with materials, teachers, and each other, not discovered alone. It's a question the children return to again and again, in a different form each time:
A Reggio studio makes the most sense when you're standing in it — the light table, the clay, the work still drying on the walls. Schedule a visit to our West LA preschool and see it for yourself.
Schedule a TourIn Their Own Words
Every piece of art here comes with a story — what a child was noticing, trying, or puzzling over as they made it. Our teachers write those observations down as the work happens, so what you're seeing isn't just a drawing but a record of a child's thinking, in their own voice. The notes on the photos below are theirs, exactly as they wrote them.
Behind the Work
Everything below came out of a real working studio, run the way the Reggio Emilia approach intends. Six things are at play in these photos:
Wood slices, shells, and fabric sit alongside paint and paper — real materials from the world outside.
Saved recyclables — caps, tubes, scraps — become material for building and collage.
A light table and projector make color, shadow, and see-through materials a medium of their own.
Malleable, sculptural work that builds spatial thinking off the flat page.
Photos paired with the children's own words and theories, so their thinking stays visible.
Children draw straight from the garden — leaves, plants, flowers — observing closely before it reaches paper.
A Reggio studio makes the most sense when you're standing in it — the light table, the clay, the work still drying on the walls. Schedule a visit to our West LA preschool and see it for yourself.
Schedule a Tour
