John Hinds was the principal at one of the schools where I worked for 10 years. Since then, we have remained friends and he moved on to lead two other schools. He and I both retired in December of 2019, and he has his own consulting business, JL Hinds Consulting. John is passionate about sharing … Read more
I don’t know how Richard Byrne does it, but he has this ability to suggest technology tools on his blog that fit in perfectly with lessons I am planning for the week. In this case, I had known about the tool, Loopy, but forgotten about it. Richard recently included it in this post, “Three Good … Read more
My 3rd grade class is always pretty small, so we usually start the year doing a Genius Hour project together so they can practice research and presentation skills. This year, my group of 4 decided they wanted to learn how the Great Barrier Reef has changed over time, and what are the consequences of these … Read more
I’m going to break one of my blogging rules and write about something that I haven’t actually seen or read yet (I don’t think this is first time I’ve broken that rule, but I could be wrong). I keep running across articles about it, and I heard an interview with the author on NPR. One … Read more
My 3rd grade GT students are currently working on a project that involves improving behavior in the cafeteria. They are focusing on two separate things: noise in the cafeteria and messiness in the cafeteria. From one of their systems thinking books, they learned that it can help to solve a problem by looking at others who … Read more
When I introduced Genius Hour to my 3rd graders this year, they were really excited about creating “missions” about anything that interested them. The week after they set their goals for their projects, they came into class and I announced that we were going to switch gears. We have been working on a unit on … Read more