Book Study: Worksheets Don’t Grow Dendrites: Chapter 12

I’m a little late to the linky party today! I have to admit that I have been partaking in some retail therapy today 🙂

But, I’m here! I’m ready to go for problem-based and project-based learning.

I know I’ve shared this picture before, but I think that it represents what we should be allowing our students to do…which is take charge of their learning. I think (me included) we start to do more for our students and we take away their ability to struggle through a little. It can be so frustrating at times and you just want to jump in and tell them what to do. Us teachers have a habit of being somewhat controlling 🙂 I mean that in the best possible way of course.

One project that have done recently were these bridges from Deanna Jump’s Billy Goats Gruff unit. They had to build bridges with gumdrops, popsicle sticks and tooth picks. They loved it but they also struggled with it…which is good. I just had to make sure that I gave them a lot of time to complete them. They also have to work together and make a plan to keep their goat on the bridge. There were so many great teaching points and students got a taste of making plans and seeing how they sometimes don’t work. They had to be flexible and come up with different strategies. Some had to put them together just to take them back apart again.

I want to do more projects like this…especially at the end of the year. We do habitat projects at the end of every year. The students have to research a habitat and then create one in a shoe-box and write about it. It always is a big mess and there is all kinds of paper all over the room. I do it every year because the kids tell me how much they love it and I know they learn as much as they can about their habitat by creating their own.

Make sure to link up with Sarah at First Grader at Last!