It’s been a long time since I’ve managed a blog post. If you were around about three years ago, you’ll know that I only get halfway through posting our journey with Imaginary Island – in fact the last post was a wrap up of some of our notebooking pages.
Our co-op group finished the Imaginary Island year strong. Immediately after my last post we dived into some amazing food web projects. The kids researched animals suited to one particular ecosystem on their island. They explored predators and prey, and came up with networks of plants, animals, and fungi – including some Imaginary organisms too!
We then moved through human arrival on their islands, the resources humans might find, and how these resources were used to meet the Fundamental Human Needs of the residents. We wrote myths and came up with creative projects to showcase how those needs were met. At this point we were getting on to the end of the year, so we finished up by creating timelines of island history, and coming up with travel brochures for our islands in the modern day.
As we were finishing up our year I contacted a provider of homeschool classes in our area. My kids had been taking classes there for a couple of years, and I pitched the idea of bringing this class to more kids in our community.
So – at the beginning of last year I started teaching Imaginary Island again to a new group of kids. I assume most do not have a Montessori background. While the larger projects remained the same I refined the order of some of the lessons, removed a few things and added lessons in Island Industry. At the same time my co-op wanted more of the same, so we spent a semester creating cities. We looked at how a city needs to serve its citizens, government types, industry, waste management, technology, changing cities over time, and more.
It was a great year on both fronts. My kids and the co-op kids still bring up our Imaginary projects with fondness, and I have kids at the homeschool program who are waiting for me to offer Imaginary Island again so that they can take it. (This year I’ve taught Game Design and Spycraft!) I will say, it was a year with a heavy workload for me: I was designing a totally new program in “Imaginary City,” and since I was teaching Imaginary Island again I decided to formally write out my lesson plans.
I’ve been revising, reworking, and editing them ever since…and I’m just about done…