Blog Post 4: Genius Hour Journey Shanna Pittman
After our last class and learning about Genius Hour, I thought about myself in school and how I would have loved being able to spend class time learning more about my passions and my many questions! This is an awesome opportunity for our students and I think it is an excellent opportunity to engage students in something that interests them. Having said that, it presented me with a few challenges.
As a kindergarten teacher, I am presented with unique challenges. My students are not independent readers yet. Therefore, they are not able to go to their laptops or grab a book and read about about what most interests them. It took several plans as well as trial and error to create a Genius Hour as close to the model as possible and still developmentally appropriate.
I began by modeling a few questions that began with "I wonder..." Since this was our first attempt, students stayed in a whole group as they shared what they wonder. When they had a sense of how to develop a good question, I began writing their questions on the board. Inevitable some students told me questions that I had already been written, and I excepted those questions since this was our first experience. We had seven questions written on our flipchart at the conclusion.
After I had the topics to research, I pulled books from my classroom library and the school library. I also created seven Blendspaces, one per topic and put the link to each on my class Tizmos page (which is the home screen on each child's laptop). The Blendspaces had some videos, images, and read aloud books on them. .Some students worked independently and some chose to do their research in groups of 2 or 3.
As they finished their research, we called them over to let them tell us individually about what they would like to create to share their newly learned information. Students created posters, wrote books, and created 3D models to share with the class and some special guests.
I enjoyed Genius Hour with my class and they surprised me with all they learned and the new questions that were sparked by their research. My ultimate goal was to take the concept of Genius Hour and make it something that is manageable for young children. I think I accomplished that goal and my students were excited and engaged. By allowing students to work collaboratively, even my students who are afraid to try new things because of fear of failure, were able to work outside of their comfort zone and get excited about the process.
Hi Shanna,
ReplyDeleteI admire how you work to take any pbl strategy/structure presented and adapt it to fit the needs, abilities, and interests of your kindergarten students. Genius Hour was absolutely no exception. I've learned that when we know our students and we identify the "need to knows" we build our most effective curriculum beginning where they are and addressing what they need in order to be successful with the outcomes. You unit shows just that. I like how you generated questions with your students whole group and allowed students to choose their own question or to research alongside a peer who had the same question. I also appreciate how you used blendspace and tizmos as tech tools that helped you to provide students with access to appropriate sources that could help them be independent with their search for the answers to their questions. In reviewing your evidence of application in your Genius Hour folder in google drive I was able to view your Genius Hour google slides presentation and enjoyed seeing their questions, their work in action, and most of all the student created posters and books.
This is Melissa commenting. I am amazed that you could adapt Genius Hour to kindergarten. I like the way you did it by brainstorming the I wonder questions. It sounds like you had to do a lot of legwork in gathering resources and compiling those into blendspaces, but that makes such good sense because then students are able to learn about what they want to. You made me think about how Genius Hour works in early childhood.
ReplyDelete