Genius Hour - Round 6

This week was very interesting. Students really started to think about their topics. I had 3 students approach me about changing their topics. While they were very excited about the topics, they realized through their research that some of them may have been not been going in the direction they had hoped for. I thought this was great! I was thrilled to see them thinking deeply about their topics and the direction they wanted to go with them.

To start Genius Hour, we read Going Places by Peter and Paul Reynolds. The kids really enjoyed this book, as they have all of our Genius Hour read alouds thus far.

Students got right to work researching and I began pulling them over to conference. Conferencing provided great one on one time that allowed me to teach the students where they are at and what they needed to learn from me at that time. For example, one student wants to conduct an interview. This is probably the hardest topic for me to wrap my head around out of all of the topics in our class. However, the little girls is SO EXCITED - that was the goal! We conferenced and decided that she would begin researching good interview questions and jotting them down. She wants to interview Katy Perry. We posted on her FB page and also sent her a Tweet from our class Twitter account. Fingers crossed - please reply Katy Perry!

My daughter attends a project based learning charter school in our district. She works within 6 week project cycles. During each cycle she is expected to research 60 facts on her topic from a variety of resources. This got me thinking about Genius Hour....when could students start working on their projects? I had not set any guidelines for them. Should I have? I decided to tell them that they needed at least 5 facts about their topic to start. We will evaluate after they have obtained 5 facts whether or not they should continue on researching.