The educator behind it
Meet children where they are, design the day around the ones who need the most, and every single child rises.
There's a quiet failure happening in education right now. We keep trying to fit every child into the same box, then wonder why so many of them are struggling inside it. No curriculum can be everything to everyone. But when we design for the children who need the most support, every child in the room rises with them.
I've spent close to twenty years watching this play out in every kind of room. Gymnasiums where I rebuilt lessons until no child got left at the door. Outdoor education spaces where children moved through the world instead of staring at it. A private school for autistic children, where the day was built around how each child actually learned, not how we wished they would. Inclusive classrooms from Kindergarten through post-secondary. My Master's, in autism and children's mental health, gave me the research to back what I'd already watched be true. Different rooms, different ages, same answer every time: meet children where they are, design the day around the ones who need the most, and every single child rises.
Then my own son started Kindergarten. He's the kind of kid who figures things out quietly and doesn't ask for much, which in a class of twenty-six five-year-olds and all the complexity that comes with them made him easy to overlook. Around the same time, friends started telling me about their own five-year-olds already losing their love of school. And it hit me, sharp and clear: none of this has to be this way. Kindergarten is play. It's the world outside the window, and the questions a child asks while standing in it. It's the foundation for a lifetime of loving to learn. Not the year we sit them down at a desk.
I'm on maternity leave with my second right now. When I'm not on leave, my work is supporting inclusive education. The rest of my hours go to this. Wild & Rise is for my boys, and for yours. For slower mornings. For real time together. For a Canadian curriculum that respects what these early years are actually for. Built by someone who has spent her whole career making sure the children the system tends to overlook get to rise alongside everyone else.
Kimberly Anne
What went into it
Nothing in Wild & Rise is there by accident. Every week is built on the same foundations I spent twenty years learning to trust. The science of reading, so that phonological awareness and phonics arrive in the order the evidence actually supports. Fundamental movement skills, woven through all forty weeks instead of saved for a gym block. Occupational-therapy-informed handwriting, where hand strength and posture come before the pencil ever touches paper.
The shape of the days comes from somewhere too. Play as the engine of learning, not the reward at the end. The environment as a teacher in its own right. Time outdoors and on the land, with Canadian seasons and Canadian context running through everything, because a child learns the world by standing in it. One anchor concept each week, explored through every subject, so the learning connects instead of scattering.
And underneath all of it, the principle I care about most: every lesson is designed so every child finds a way in. An entry point for the child who needs the most support, and room to climb for the child who's ready to run. That isn't an add-on or an accommodation. It's the architecture. Built from a career spent making sure the children the system tends to overlook get to rise alongside everyone else.