Educational concept
La Rueda kindergarten

La Rueda was founded in 2015, five years after the establishment of the children's program A la Rueda, a Spanish-language interdisciplinary children's art workshop that has been running for 10 years at WUK (Werkstätten und Kulturhaus), where our NGO Großes Schiff is based. This experience inspired the motivation to continue putting down roots in the educational field. The workshop at WUK, like the school, arose from the desire to create a social, philosophical, creative, and transcultural space for multilingual children and their families, where they could interact through music, dance, theater, and visual arts. This led to the opportunity to develop and combine their creative expression with their linguistic ability. From the need to meet and interact with different Spanish-speaking cultures and their reciprocal learning, thus giving us the opportunity to rediscover and differentiate ourselves through play and creative social interaction. La Rueda is the shortened name of our program for children and their families on WUK, A la Rueda, and the name that the audience gave us once the program began. A la Rueda, a wheel, was the name of a radio program for children and their families in southern Argentina, which existed during the childhood of the friend with whom I started the program. The name seemed appropriate because it fit the program's concept: an annual cycle of encounters, composed of music, dance, visual arts, and space, that would be repeated and would never stop rolling. For us, the wheel was also a symbol of reunion and encounter with different Spanish-speaking cultures and their mutual learning, giving us the opportunity to rediscover and differentiate ourselves through play and creative social interaction. This is something we also aimed for with this program. ​ It symbolizes movement; it's circular. It can be thought of as the value of the four beats of a whole note, the first rhythmic figure in music, just as there are also four seasons. And it's what makes a structure tick or operate. And when I thought of the image of a wheel, I was immediately reminded of a quote by Nietzsche from his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a wheel that spontaneously turns, a holy saying yes." A yes to play, to curiosity, to questioning and exploration. Then we felt certainty, and thus the search for a name was concluded. ​ Then came the task of creating a logo that would visually represent us, and in doing so, my friend, who is an artist with experience in graphic design, tested ideas, inquired, and explored a bit. Together, we concluded that this current logo was the right one: a wheel with three colors like brushstrokes representing the three artistic disciplines we wanted to work with and create: music, dance, visual arts, and space. We unified visual arts and space as their own artistic disciplines because, for us, it was important to differentiate between just visual arts and visual arts transferred to or related to space.