BILINGUAL PATHWAY
At Totem Nursery School, every educational path is born within relationships: between children, adults, spaces, and languages. Education is a shared journey, built day by day through listening and exploration.
The collective — educators, teachers, workshop leaders, and pedagogues — plans the paths for the different sections together, starting from observing the children and their interests, and from the same theoretical framework that is adapted to the identity of each group. There are no isolated projects: each section communicates with the others, in a consistency that runs throughout the whole school, from the nursery to the kindergarten.
This collaborative work feeds on daily observation, documentation, and constant dialogue between adults, and allows the creation of learning environments that can embrace the hundred languages of children — bodily, graphic, sound, symbolic, verbal — weaving them into play, workshops, and everyday life.
The Totem Nursery School welcomes children from 9 months to 6 years old in two nursery sections (9–36 months) and two kindergarten sections (3–6 years), all of mixed ages: a pedagogical choice that encourages exchanges between children, mutual learning and a natural continuity in the growth steps.
Educational Continuity 0-6 years
At Totem, the continuity between nursery and preschool is a thread that consistently accompanies the children’s experience.
For families who are already attending the nursery, a new registration is not required: it’s enough to confirm continuity, because the children’s journey at Totem is designed from the start as a single path from 9 months to 6 years.
The common areas, the studio, and the park are used every day by all the children at the school, no matter which class they belong to. This means that when it’s time to move up a class, the caregivers, teachers, and studio instructor are already familiar adults, and the spaces are already familiar too. The choice of mixed-age classes comes from the same idea: to encourage interactions and exchanges that make moving between different age groups feel natural right from the start.
Towards the end of the school year, a transition process gradually guides the older children in the nursery towards the spaces and teachers they will meet the following year: small moments of approach, shared and planned together by the team, that allow the children to experience the change with curiosity rather than fear.
This continuity isn’t just about the spaces and relationships, but also about the educational project as a whole: the same theoretical framework guides the children throughout the entire journey, and — last but not least — allows them to experience truly immersive bilingualism, developed over the long term rather than in separate segments.
Bilingualism
After 15 years of running both an Italian and a bilingual curriculum side by side, starting from September 2025, the Totem School Nursery curriculum is fully bilingual. Italian and English coexist as two everyday languages, naturally intertwined in gestures, routines, play, and exploration.
After 15 years of running both an Italian and a bilingual curriculum side by side, starting from September 2025, the Totem School Nursery curriculum is fully bilingual. Italian and English coexist as two everyday languages, naturally intertwined in gestures, routines, play, and exploration. …
Every moment of the day — from welcoming to lunch, from playtime to the studio — is an opportunity to live in both languages. Italian teachers and native English speakers work closely together, giving children an authentic and consistent language environment, where learning comes from experience and relationships.
Thanks to the 0-6 year educational continuity, the bilingual experience becomes even more immersive: children don’t encounter the two languages in separate segments, but in a long and continuous journey that spans their entire childhood at Totem, from 9 months to 6 years.
Totem today is a bilingual early childhood school that follows the path of the Reggio Emilia Approach: a place of listening, shared planning, and languages that meet and multiply.
Two languages, a hundred ways.
