Infants6 weeks – 12 months1 educator to 3 infants
Toddlers12 – 24 months1 educator to 3 toddlers
Twos24 – 36 months1 educator to 4 children
Preschool3 – 4 years1 educator to 7 children
Pre-K4 – 5 years1 educator to 8 children
Southeast Portland · Six weeks to five years
Meadow is a Reggio Emilia-inspired centre where the environment is treated as the third teacher — and where a nine-week argument about shadows is allowed to run its course.
A tour will tell you how a place feels. These are the parts you can verify before you get in the car.
Three infants to an educator in groups of six. Fourteen children in Preschool, not twenty. Ratio is held continuously — including at nap, outdoors and at five in the afternoon.
See every ratioA working sculptor in the studio four days a week, and materials that have no correct outcome: clay, wire, light, wood, paint and a great deal of paper.
How we workA real outdoor classroom — cedar benches, a mud kitchen, raised beds, a stand of maple — and children in it whatever the weather short of unsafe.
The outdoor classroomEvery meal cooked here from a four-week menu, served family-style at the table with real crockery, with educators eating the same food alongside the children.
What is on the menuChildren move up when they are ready, in small groups, with a settling-in period of about three weeks. The date follows the child rather than the birthday.
6 weeks – 12 monthsInfantsSix infants, two educators, one room that never gets loud.1 educator to 3 infants, group of 612 – 24 monthsToddlersWalking, climbing, carrying, dropping — and finding out what happens.1 educator to 3 toddlers, group of 624 – 36 monthsTwosThe year of “I do it” — and the year clay arrives.1 educator to 4 children, group of 83 – 4 yearsPreschoolLong projects, real questions, and a studio that stays open.1 educator to 7 children, group of 144 – 5 yearsPre-KThe last year before school, spent making things that are genuinely hard.1 educator to 8 children, group of 16
Reggio Emilia is a city in northern Italy with a public system of infant-toddler centres and preschools. Nobody outside it is a Reggio school, and a centre in Oregon calling itself one is overclaiming.
What we take from it, and take seriously: the child as capable rather than empty; the environment as the third teacher; an atelier with a trained artist in it; long projects that follow the children’s question rather than a calendar; and pedagogical documentation — photographs, transcripts and drawings on the wall — as the way both children and adults find out what is actually being thought.
What we do not do: sequence materials the way Montessori does, run a themed curriculum, or teach a letter of the week. Those are coherent approaches. They are simply not this one.
In September a four-year-old in the Preschool room asked why her shadow was in front of her in the morning and behind her after lunch. The question was still running at half-term. This is what a long project actually looks like — not a theme, not a craft, and not a week.
Week one
“Why is my shadow in front and then it goes behind me?”
The educator does not answer it. She writes it on a card, reads it back to the child to check she has it right, and pins it where the children can see it. A question you answer on the spot is a question that stops.
Week two
“Draw round me again after lunch and we will see.”
Outlines at 9:40 and again at 1:15, in chalk, on the same paving slabs. Nobody suggests it: it comes out of the group. The afternoon outline is somewhere else entirely and there is an argument about whether somebody cheated.
Week four
“The light has to come from over there or it goes wrong.”
The atelierista puts an overhead projector, a stack of acetate and a box of found objects on the floor and leaves. Shadows become something you can move rather than something that happens to you. The projector stays out for a month.
Week five
“The shadow is asleep at lunchtime so it goes small.”
This theory is written on the wall next to the first question, in the child’s words, and it stays there. Correcting it would end the project. Three weeks later the same child crosses it out herself and writes a different one underneath.
Week seven
“We need a stick that stays still.”
A dowel in a bucket of sand, and a chalk mark every hour that anyone remembers. The marks are not evenly spaced and this is noticed. Two children start counting the gaps. Nobody has said the word "sundial" and nobody is going to.
Week nine
“That one is mine. That is the one I got wrong.”
Nine weeks of photographs, transcripts, chalk tracings and the crossed-out theory go up along the corridor at child height. Parents read it at pickup, in coats, standing up. This is the documentation: not a display of finished work, but a record of thinking that the child can find herself in.
Not a timetable — a rhythm. The times are real and the rooms hold to them, but what happens inside each block belongs to the children.
The slow door
Doors open at 7:30 and stay slow until nine. Arriving is a handover, not a drop-off — a minute at the door with the person who will have your child all day.
What is set out
Each room opens with something laid out on a low table — materials, an object, a question written down. It is an invitation, not an assignment, and children are free to ignore it entirely.
Every day, all of them
Every room goes outside every day, in every weather short of unsafe. Portland rain is not weather; it is the climate. Children have waterproofs here and we own spares.
Family-style, at the table
Food is cooked here, in our kitchen, from a four-week rotating menu. Children serve themselves from bowls at the table, with real crockery and real cutlery, and educators sit and eat the same meal.
Everybody rests, not everybody sleeps
Cots come out, blinds come half down, the lamps go on. Children who sleep, sleep. Children who do not lie down for twenty minutes with a book and then get up and work quietly.
The atelier is open
The afternoon belongs to the studio. Clay, wire, paint, light and wood, with the atelierista, for as long as a child wants to stay with something.
The long, quiet end
The last hour is deliberately unstructured — outside if the light holds, books and blankets if it does not. Pickup is a second handover: what they did, who they did it with, and anything you need to know.
Ask every centre you visit for this table. Ask whether the ratio holds at nap and at five o'clock. The answer, and how quickly it comes, tells you most of what you need to know.
Meadow's own staffing, with Oregon's certified-center maximum beside it. Ratio is counted per room and held continuously — including at nap, outdoors, and at five in the afternoon.
Regulatory — never recoloured
| Room | Ages | Meadow ratio | Meadow group size | Oregon maximum ratio | Oregon maximum group |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Infants | 6 wks – 12 mo | 1 : 3 | 6 | 1 : 4 | 8 |
| Toddlers | 12 – 24 mo | 1 : 3 | 6 | 1 : 4 | 8 |
| Twos | 2 – 3 yrs | 1 : 4 | 8 | 1 : 5 | 10 |
| Preschool | 3 – 4 yrs | 1 : 7 | 14 | 1 : 10 | 20 |
| Pre-K | 4 – 5 yrs | 1 : 8 | 16 | 1 : 10 | 20 |
Tagged with how long that family has been here and which room their child started in, because tenure tells you something a score cannot. We do not publish a star rating and there is no aggregate rating in this site's structured data.
I toured six centres in one week and this is the only one where I could hear myself think. Not because it was empty — there were twelve children in the room — but because nothing in it was shouting.
Our daughter has a peanut allergy and I have had the same conversation at every centre we have been to. Meadow was the only one where the plan already existed before I asked, and where the person who plates her food could describe it to me from memory.
He spent nine weeks on shadows. Nine weeks. I kept waiting for them to move him on to something and they just kept going, and by the end he was explaining refraction to me in the bath, incorrectly and with total conviction.
Approach · 6 minWhat a provocation actually is (and what it is not)Reggio-inspired schools talk constantly about provocations. Here is what one looks like on a Tuesday morning in the Twos room, and why the word is doing real work rather than decorating a craft table.Safety · 7 minHow we practise safe sleep, in plain languageAlone, on the back, in a crib, every time. What safe sleep means in practice in our infant room, what we do about the fifteen-minute checks, and the one thing that can change any of it.Tours run Tuesday and Thursday at 9:30am, deliberately while the rooms are full and working. Bring your child if you like. Allow an hour.
Six palettes
Every palette was measured against both themes before it was offered here. None of them is corrected at runtime to make it pass — a palette that could not pass was not shipped.
The licence block, the ratio tables, the allergy and medication summary and the authorised-pickup notice do not move. Not under any palette, and not in either theme.
Reading
Text size
Motion
Your device’s reduce-motion setting is the default. “Still” stops the dust field, the parallax and every scroll-driven animation on the site, not just the decoration.
These controls change the page you are reading. They are not a conformance claim: this demonstration has not been through a WCAG audit, and saying otherwise would be the same kind of unverifiable badge the rest of this site refuses to print.
This site has no analytics, no advertising pixel, no third-party script and no map embed. The only thing it would ever put in your browser is what you choose here — theme, palette and reading settings — under meadow.brand.v1, meadow.reading.v1and meadow.storage.v1. Nothing is written until you answer this.
Both buttons are one click and neither is pre-selected. Escape does the same as “Store nothing”. If you store nothing, your choices still work — they just last until you close the tab.
Studio mode
Colour seeds
A seed lends its hue and its chroma. It never lends lightness, so the site keeps its own tonal structure — and its contrast — whatever you pick.
Type
Identity
What will not move
The licence block, the ratio and group-size tables, the allergy and medication summary, the authorised-pickup notice and the demo disclaimer paint from a separate set of properties that this panel refuses, at runtime, to write. Safety and licensing information is not a styling choice.