What does a picture wheel do that a word wheel cannot?
It works for somebody who cannot read yet. That is a plain accessibility fact rather than a nice extra: a wheel labelled in words is closed to a three-year-old and a wheel labelled in pictures is not. Here the picture is the label, and the word under it is for the adult and for the child who is beginning to decode.
It also drops the language. A child naming animals in a second language sees the elephant and says it in whichever language the lesson is in — nothing on the rim tells them which word to reach for, so the picture asks the question and the child supplies the language. A word wheel asks two questions at once, and the reading one gets in the way of the naming one.
Which pictures survive being cut into a wedge?
One subject, centred, filling the frame, facing the camera. A wedge crops its picture from the middle and narrows towards the hub, so anything near an edge is gone — and a cropped ear is not a cat to a small child, it is a shape. Head and shoulders beat a whole animal in a landscape, and a plain or heavily blurred background beats a zoo enclosure every time.
Avoid the three things that read as something else: hands holding the animal, two animals in one frame, and an animal so far away that the setting becomes the subject. Test it the way a child does — look at the wheel from two metres, for one second. If you cannot name it in that second, neither can they, and the picture is decoration rather than a label.
How do you use one wheel for naming, sorting and counting?
Naming is the first pass: spin, say what it is, spin again. Sorting is the same wheel with a question attached — does it have four legs, does it live in water, would you find it on a farm — and the child answers about whatever came up rather than about a worksheet whose order somebody else decided.
Counting is the third. Spin ten times, make one mark per animal, then read the marks back. Repeats are the point here, which is why this wheel is not in elimination mode: a tally with no repeats is not a tally. It is also the first honest picture of chance a five-year-old sees, and the probability lesson ten years later is the same object with numbers on it.
What else is this wheel good for?
It is the picture wheel with animals on it, so a segment’s picture and colour work the way they do there. For “name an animal beginning with…”, the letter wheel draws the letter and the child supplies the animal.
The same wheel with your register on it calls a name instead of an animal, which is the classroom picker. The same pictures acted out instead of named is charades.