Our Wonder Hour

This year we tried something new in Room 15. We gave Wonder Hour, also called Genius Hour, a try. 

During Wonder Hour the students had the opportunity to work on projects of their own that interested them for one hour a week. 

These projects ranged from research reports about shipwrecks in the Great Lakes to creating Rube Goldberg machines to making videos about Origami.

Here are some of some of our projects.

Andrew made a slide show and video about how to play marbles.



Kaiya and Kayla made a slide show about minerals.




This student researched volcanoes and created a poster to share with the class about what she learned.

Bradyn and Ruby were interested in origami. Bradyn created a website about origami and then created a video to put on his website. 

Bradyn's Origami site

Ruby also created a video and put it on her personal blog.

Here is the link to Ruby's blog and video.
 
We still have a few weeks of school to go, and we're doing our best to finish up some projects. If/when they are finished, I will add them here.

We learned a LOT, both the students and the teacher. Most importantly, we learned that the first time we try something it might not work, but that's okay, we can try again. We can use what we learned from the first failed attempt to make it better the next time. We learned that it takes hard work and perseverance and grit to keep going even if we're frustrated -- we've had to re-record five times and we still didn't get it right, or no matter where we look we can't find the information we're seeking, or we just can't seem to figure out a way to attach a piece to the structure we're building.

We learned that we can seek help from others, look at it in a new way, and stick with it until we figure it out.

Those are important things to learn.


For visitors to the blog, what do you think of our projects? Also, I asked this question at the beginning of the year when I first introduced what we were doing, and I will ask it again. If you could learn about anything you wanted, what would you choose to learn about? I would want to learn Sign Language.