20% time aka Genius Hour

Student led inquiry learning time is around building up our students to be

Life Long Learners

With moving from NE/Y1 to Y3/4 I've been looking into ways in which I can motivate, inspire and encourage my students to be life long learners, and learn how to peruse their passions. 

That's where 'Genius hour' comes in.

I've signed up for a 4 part free series by A. J. Juliani to learn a little more about Genius Hour and how it might look in my classroom.

Here is a link to part one.

Part one is about WHY we need to give students a choice.

Below the video there are lots of resource links to read more - i've gone through a few of them and they all seem to align quite wonderfully to what we want our learners to be.

Click on the video link above to get to these links.

As with anything, the biggest inhibitor of this will be time.

I think i'll pop into my classroom today to see how the building project is going... or if it has started! With having more of an open plan learning environment we're going to have to work our timetables together... which I hope leaves time for Genius hour!

Here is a blog which has some awesome writing about Genius hour and implementing it.... The author also has made a great interactive notebook packet on TPT... which might be the first thing I buy off Teachers Pay Teachers!

Extend Yourself! (oopsi! Forgot to post in 2014)

Just found this in my 'drafts' - oopsi!
But liked it so much decided I would post it late anyway!

One 'saying' in Room 3 is...
'How will/can you extend yourself?'

On Tuesday during Maths I saw the first evidence of 2 girls doing just that... extending themselves!

Their group was learning about decomposing numbers, and we were using fly flips to do so,

As in the example above, all the fly flips have 5 flies on the front, and another number between 5 and 10. On the back is how many more flies you would need to make this number. 

So as in above, the question would be 5+?=7, and you can see on the reverse side that the answer is 2. 

As a group we were playing a game with the fly flips, and two of the students were always winning, so I sent them away with some fly flips and said 'extend yourself'... I turned around a bit later to see what they were doing and I couldn't believe my ears when I heard them answering in Te Reo and Samoan!

Awesome Work Girls!

They did it again at morning tea with a student filming so we have a record of their choice in extending them self. 

Have a watch of Una and Ester answering the fly flips in Te Reo and Samoan.

Fly Flips - Extend Yourself from Ruth Vercoe on Vimeo.

2015 - Bring it on!!

After having a wonderful break my mind is slowly ticking back into the classroom and thinking about what this year holds in the classroom.

This year is going to be full of lots of learning and changes.... which i'm excited about!

I'm going to be staying at Riccarton Primary, which is awesome. I've loved my 6 months here so far and can't wait to see what 2015 holds for all of us... but i'm moving up in ages, from teaching New Entrants and Year 1 students over the last 3 years, i'm taking a little jump up to Years 3 and 4... which will mean giving my program an overhaul, but that's a good thing!

The next change is my teaching environment... in a few days builders will be in my room making a hole/walk way between my classroom and the next door one... I think it will be about triple door size... but i'll have to wait and see what it actually looks like... might sneak into school and take some photos of the building in action!

This small building project will be the start of a Modern Learning Environment (MLE) which will have myself and another teacher in collaboration... which we don't fully know what it will look like just yet, but by the time the kids arrive we'll have 1.0 ready to go. 

We visited another school to begin this process and what we heard from their principal and the teachers was that it was ever evolving. Something that worked in Term 1 might not in Term 3, and an idea what was awesome somewhere else, might not have the same outcome in our environment. So as I said to begin - lot of change and learning - but i'm looking forward to it!

To get my head in the game, i'm beginning to look at some other schools and how they do it through looking at blogs and videos.

Below is one i've recently watched which (IS LONG! but...) shows perspectives from principal, teachers and parents... it's not how ours will be to begin with... but who knows what learning environments could be like in a few years time!