Interesting title huh?

Truly our imagination is what we need to be successful. Imagination is what leads us to possible options to solve many of the problems we face. Yet how many times a day does our imagination get to come out and be seen by others?

I’ve started our week back with an art challenge each morning. Guess what students don’t want to do….. share their work. Why? The answer is simple yet extremely complex. They don’t want to share because of experiences in the past, judgement by their peers, lack of confidence in themselves, and so many more unknowns. Do we let this continue or do we try to trump those feelings and explore what our imagination holds?

No test that my students take this year will explore their imaginations. What will allow for that imagination to explode out of our classroom comes from the opportunities they have. We work on sharing our ideas each day and building a level of respect and confidence that ideas are chances to get better.

How many times a day does our imagination get to come out and be seen by others?

Tomorrow we are going to start a failure box to show that some ideas don’t work out, yet they can break the walls that we have put up around our imaginations. We can’t let fear trump our possible earth shattering ideas. If that fear trumps my 3rd graders’ imaginations then I have failed miserably.

I want them to:

Explore

Create

Share

Reflect

Fail Forward

Think

Create some more.

What will we do if we continue to allow for those imaginations to be trumped by fear of critique or worse that students become immune to any creative thought?

Lego bricks, keva planks, pipe cleaners, origami paper, cameras, pencils, paper, paint, vinyl, duct tape, 3d printers, etc are all tools that can help break our imaginations free. Let’s hope that we can trump fear through the use of our imaginations and strengthen the resolve of all our learners to prepare themselves for a bright future full of thoughts and ideas.

Once those ideas leave our brains the chances to make them better appear from the words and actions of those around us, locally and globally. I want those ideas to bounce around the world, not just within a 9 year old’s brain, but to other minds that can help grow the idea. Let’s commit this year to being passionate about imagination and what that holds for our future learners.