Academics

Selm Academy Wellness Principles

Our Islamic holistic education is based on the following principles:

Spiritual

1. Theocentric: We help our students to see God and His work in the creation of nature and humans.
2. Divine Role Models: Our Prophet and Twelve Imams are divine role models for our students. They play an essential part in students’ spiritual and moral development.

Emotional

1. Visualization: We strive to present information with both pictorial and emotional elements. Visualization encourages students to make connections and see patterns.
2. Plurilingual-Multicultural: We teach Arabic (as the language of Islam) and our students’ heritage languages to enhance their cognitive and emotional development.

Physical

1. Activity: We promote active sports to have physically healthy students. We believe that a healthy mind should reside in a healthy body.
2. Body-Mind Connections: Our curriculum helps our student to improve the natural connection between the body and the mind. Appropriate martial arts training movements and drama are employed to stimulate the mind-body connection in the classroom and outdoors.

Intellectual

1. Projects-Integrated: Hands-on projects are integrated into academic subjects in a way that engages the heart, mind, and body of a student all at once.
2. Subject Connections: An organic connection is made between school subjects producing an integrated curriculum. Several subjects are integrated around a broad theme with one subject being the focus of a month’s lessons’ theme.

Social

1. Community Resources: We work with the best teachers from our community as a collective effort to educate our children and build our community.
2. Community Connections: We strive to form a cooperative community at school to encourage our students to provide positive feedback and solve their peers’ problem. Our students are also connected to the global community through community service activities.

Aesthetical

1. Narrative: storytelling and poetry naturally stimulate children’s imagination. Our teachers inspire students to learn different subjects through stories.
2. Art: Through the visual, graphic, decorative, and performing arts, our students explore the world around them, appreciate their cultural heritage, and express themselves in different forms.

Environmental

1. Earth Connections: Through gardening, our students renew their relationship with the earth. We promote ecological literacy to cultivate the knowledge, empathy, and action required for protecting our earth.
2. Experiential: Open-ended hands-on activities in the nature engage children to explore new concepts on their own. Nature promotes learning by improving students’ attention, reducing levels of stress, provoking interest in and joy of learning.