Recently we put together a year in review post that outlined what we accomplished in 2020. In it, we referenced the release of our Wheel of Imagination and how it acts as the foundation of all of our programming.
The Wheel was designed by Imagiread’s Head Imaginarian, Mrs. Tiffany, during her many years of classroom and out-of-school time instruction. She noted the impact of the environment and how content should work together to produce robust and positive educational experiences. Scholars need to be centered, focused, and engage in topics that interest them through a cultural lens at the helm. Acting as a methodology that encourages academic integrity, the Wheel produces outcomes that support scholars with respective activities and exercises that continuously focus on procedural, conceptual, and factual knowledge.
Mindfulness & Mindful Learning
Everything begins with mindfulness and mindful learning, as such does the Wheel. Here, scholars learn the basic tenants of neuroscience and how the brain functions when actively learning versus passive learning. Meditative practices begin each lesson and scholars learn to connect with their breath inciting the beginning of learning.
Physical Health & Activity
What’s a healthy mind without a healthy body? Next on the Wheel is Physical Health & Activity where scholars delve into the basics of physical health including food, fitness, and function. Throughout literacy development instruction, physical exercises are interspersed so that learners don’t tune out and get the recess they need intermittently.
Learning & Personal Enrichment
A huge part of ensuring every child is whole, healthy, and happy is making sure that they feel good about what they learn. Experiences here are designed to be personal thereby encouraging scholars to discover and explore interests that are relative, reflective, and adaptive.
Social Relationships
Healthy social relationships require scholars to be intuitively self-aware. The CASEL model for social-emotional learning illustrates contributing dynamics and how they work together to influence healthy social interaction. Social skills are critical for growing scholars. The Wheel incorporates lessons that uphold a dialogue that expounds on the importance of social-emotional intelligence and how it benefits individuals, families, and communities as a whole.
Community
Armed with all of the preceding pieces, here scholars learn and understand how critical community is and relate that to their real-life circumstances and experiences. With the over-arching question in mind “How can I better my community with what I’ve learned?”, the community piece acts as a reflective achievement point.
Because the Wheel is inspired by the Whole Child, Whole School, Whole Community model, it prioritizes the safety and well-being of scholars as well as educators and community organizers. We will be posting modeling exercises for our community to follow along with in the coming weeks. Stay tuned and follow us on Instagram and Facebook for more information.
Have studied the Wheel of Imagination at length and support its ethos and culture; Relationships, Learning, and Behaviour. Children’s wellbeing is at the heart of ‘Getting it Right for Every Child’. This means focusing on the wellbeing of every child to ensure that they are safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible, and included.
What a wonderful synopsis! Yes indeed. Every child deserves to healthily actualize. We’re excited to release programming in line in the coming weeks.