Genius Hour... Hours 4 and 5 - Cultivate and Search

Genius Hour is alive and well in Room 222.

We have wondered, created an idea and drawn all about it. Now it is time to write all we know and finally cultivate our essential questions.

See our previous posts here:

Hour 1

Hours 2 and 3

Hour 4 involved writing everything we know to help us figure out what we are still wondering about.

Topic: Movie Making

The students took out  their Genius Hour notebooks and began writing all of their schema and thoughts on their topics.

Topic: Building a Runway

One the questions were finalized, we place them on our Genius Board. 

Hour 5 started our "search" phase. We started by going to the library to find books on our topics. We had to decide if each book would help us answer our question.

Once we found books that were going to be helpful, we checked them out and added them to our Genius Hour bags.

Some of our topics don't lend themselves well to texts in our library so we did some internet searching. This can be tricky in a 1st grade room. However, we talk about the best ways to search and the best sites to use to help us search. We also equate the internet to a field trip. When we leave on a field trip, we talk about safety rules. The internet is just like leaving the building. We must talk about safety rules for that as well.

Mrs. K and Mr. Odom helped supervise some of our trickier searches (Blueman Group and Potions).

We often type in the phrase "for kids" to help narrow our searches. So if I am searching Potions, I would type in "Potions for Kids". This usually brinks up kid friendly sites with kid focused activities.

Kidrex.org is one of  our favorite search engines because it is more kid friendly.

Hour 5 was by far the most exhausting for the grown-ups but most exciting for the kids. I would like to thank Mrs. Goff for helping Room 222 with this process. We traveled to the library, they were independent and they found what they were looking for. Next week we will begin using this information to help us learn more about our topics.

*Teacher Note - Some of our research will be given to the students via videos found by the teacher. For example, it is very hard to find information on the Blue Man Group but it is easy to find appropriate video clips. 

These videos will be placed in a safe environment (safeshare.tv) and given to the kids via QR code to help foster independence and easy reference.