Genuises at Work!

Many weeks ago we started our genius hour and we are almost finished!  Every Wednesday afternoon we meet with our buddies!   Before spring break we looked at questions and the difference between red light and green light questions.  Do you know the difference?

Red light questions are questions that make you stop and think, to ponder and to wonder.  Green light questions are questions that you can answer really quickly or that you can find the answer to easily.

After we did this we had to write as many questions about a basketball as we could think of. . . wow! did we ever have a lot of questions.  We then sorted our questions into red light and green light questions.  We also decided we needed a category that we could put questions in that weren't really relevant to our topic.  We called this the "Trash Can."













 Once we had a good understanding of questions and how they can help guide our learning we began to investigate our own wonders.  We started with a sheet to guide our thinking.

We had to choose a topic we were interested in and then begin to narrow our focus.  Once we had chosen our wonder topic and developed our guiding questions we began to research and find out the answers to our wonders.  Some of our topics included:  how to make glue, who would win. . .  a mandrill or a leopard, rock climbing, space, dolphins. . . And the list goes on and on!

We watched a short YouTube video made by a student explaining genius hour a bit more.  It reminded us that sometimes it can be hard work and that it doesn't always go like we planned.  We also got some ideas on how we might present our topic.  We are very excited to explore our wonders and can't wait to share them with everyone!  Here are some pictures of us working with our buddies!

Finding out how to rock climb safely and where you can do it!

Learning more about space. . . .

Researching how to make glue!

Lots of discussion between buddies!

 Learning all about Jupiter. . . they decided to make a model using plasticene and a poster to explain what they had learned.

Recreating the Battle of Gettysburg.  

Using the app Book Creator to make their own "Who Would Win Book"

Sometimes our little buddies teach our big buddies how to use the apps!