Tag: The Passion Project

K-5

Kindergarten One-Pager For Genius Hour (Free Download)

Terri Eichholz

As promised, my Blog Break is over. As expected, my contract obligations for a couple of projects are continuing — so I don’t actually have “more time” than I did in June. But I like doing this blog, and I vowed a few years ago that I wasn’t going to let work ever get in the way of things I enjoy doing again.

During the last month, I was making notes on things to share with you, popular posts on the blog, and projects I wanted to start or revise. One of them was to create an actual downloadable one-pager for those of you who are considering doing Genius Hour with one of the primary grades. I published a post about this almost a year ago, and it gets a lot of visitors, but so do the free downloads. As with teaching, I like to make adjustments for my audience, so it seemed like an obvious first project as I start back “to work” on the blog for this season to offer a combination of the two.

The downloadable is actually 2 pages long, which kind of makes it not a one-pager, but there’s an introduction, and then the actual one-page. Printing it out will not, of course, preserve the links, so if you can save paper and just use the digital version that will probably be more beneficial. This will be on the Free Genius Hour Downloads page, but you can also get the Genius Hour Kindergarten One-Pager here.

Click here to download this PDF

5-8, Education, Motivation, Philosophy, Student Products, Teaching Tools, Universal Design for Learning, Videos

The Passion Project

Terri Eichholz

from "The Future Project Playbook"
from “The Future Project Playbook”

Sometimes I start reading a blog post and my jaw drops. I am constantly amazed by the work of educators around the globe, and Sonya Terborg is one person I deeply admire.  From her blog, I learned about The Passion Project, and I am absolutely convinced that I must somehow find a way to include this in my plans for my gifted fifth graders.

There is too much involved for me to eloquently explain The Passion Project.  Here is one sentence from the “About” page of their site, “Our goal was to give our students the opportunity to explore their passions in a meaningful way, with freedom to explore and the chance to use this time to connect to themselves as learners and as members of a community.”

On her recent post, “Gearing up for Passion!”, Sonya shared a link to a wonderful “playbook” from The Future Project, another website that has similar goals.  This 60 page free download has many thought-provoking exercises.  The image above is one excerpt.  I can’t wait to use this with my students.

I am also “passionate” about the idea of having my students create a video like the one below, “Dear World…Our messages to the world!”  You must watch this!