PBL NY Day 1 Keynote Speaker Sam Seidel

I have had the opportunity to attend PBL NY again this year.
 Shout out to my district for sending me! Thanks Cazenovia Central School District!

It is an amazing conference full of presenters, educators, administrators, college professors, and experts.
If you want to know ANYTHING about Project Based Learning, this is the place to go!

I am going to have to break this up into a bunch of posts. There is WAY too much information for one or just a few. :)

PBLNY opened with Sam Seidel.

Hip Hop Genius

What a start to the conference!

This was Sam Seidel at PBL World 2013.

If you would like to watch his presentation, click the link. 

Mr. Seidel's presentation was about "What does PBL stand for?". 

How can we keep ALL students engaged and empire them as change makers?

What's your driving question?

What do your students love to do/make?

How can you make your projects "realer"?

Keep it REAL

Real World

Real Work

ReAlevant

PBL prepares students to be:

successful in college

desirable employees

entrepreneurs

change makers

PBL can stand for:

Practice Before Life

Platform to Build their Legacy

Prevent Boring Lessons :)

Prepare Bold Leaders

As I am just touching a little on what Mr. Seidel spoke about, you should look him up. If you ever get the chance to go see him speak, he is outstanding, motivating, inspiring, and real.

He did all these things at schools. He brought in projects for kids to do that were real for them. He made them want to do well in school so that they could continue doing these kinds of projects. 

You have to check out his bio. He has done some AMAZING things!

I can't wait to see what he does next.

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Project Based Learning in a first grade classroom

Hello all! You know that I am a HUGE fan of PBL! HUGE!
I have tried it in my classroom two times. I guess three times is a charm. I have finally gotten it! We are going to be studying the lake in our town. At the end of this, the culminating project will be a field guide of the lake that will be published.
We have watched videos of lakes and ponds, read books about lakes and ponds, looked at websites about lakes and ponds. We will be having a few guest speakers in to talk to us about our town and the lake.
The most exciting thing that has happened so far is our peer critique.
We started out with discussing the different fish in our lake. Then we looked at photos of four of the fish. I gave them a choice of one of the four to illustrate.

This is one of our first drawings.

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PBLNY Final Day

Our third and final day ended with another amazing Keynote Speaker,
Yong Zhao.

Wow! I know I keep saying this, but these speakers have blown me away. I have learned so much from every single one of them.

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PBL NY

I am blown away with all the information I got yesterday from PBLNY. AND…there are two more days!!! WOW!
Yesterday began with our Keynote Speaker, Sam Chaltain.
He talked to us about some exceptional schools and what they look like.
Is it more technology that we need? In these schools that was not the main focus. It was about community, belonging, feeling, talking, singing, caring, etc..
 What a way to start! He got us so ready for the rest of the conference.
Check him out. If you ever get a chance to see him, I highly recommend it!

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Project Based Learning

I've posted about this before. I really think it is something to look into if you haven't already. 

There are plenty of things for younger kiddos.

A colleague of mine from another school and I are working on a Patterns in the Night Sky project.

We are having our first graders chart the patterns of the moon and the sun (amount of daylight) for a few months. As they are compiling this data we are going to be talking about predictions, patterns, weather, why we need to look at patterns, and other things. 

I am so excited to begin. 

We are going to be creating lunar calendars, creating a newscast, and writing a children's book about the patterns of the sun and moon.

I can't wait to share this journey with you. :)

Here are some examples of PBL in an elementary classroom.

Click on this pic to take you to a video on PBL in an primary class.

Have a wonderful day!

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Mother's Day Projects and Project Based Learning

I found a project on Pinterest for my little one's Mother's Day gifts.

We had transplanted geraniums a few weeks back. They are looking very healthy.

I didn't want this to be their only gift, so we made some "flowers".

They had such a BLAST painting the popsicle sticks for the petals.

We had a ton of paint left over. I was going to have them draw our community with crayons.

I am so glad we had so much paint left over. 

I need to do this more often.

One of the activities in our Project Based Learning Community Project was to make a landscape of our community.

They remembered EVERYTHING!!!

It's sooooooooo long!!! I just need to find a place to hang it up!

They did a fabulous job!

Have a wonderful day!

Don't forget to enter my teeny tiny giveaway. :)

CLICK HERE

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Project Based Learning Day 3

The last day. Was I prepared? Did I have everything ready? 

I was expecting to have to have everything done, but we really worked through a lot of things throughout the day. 

I have to tell you...this was probably the best three days I have spent out of the classroom learning new things. (Except for Responsive Classroom! That's a whole other topic for another day!)

So, a recap of the first two days. We decided on a topic and a Driving Question.

Mine was Community. The whole first grade takes a community walk at the end of the year. I wanted this to be more meaningful for the kiddos. Right now, we walk around the village and visit the fire station, library, police station, and court. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE our community walk. The kids get to see some of "behind the scenes" part of our community. I just wanted to go deeper.

My Driving Question was: How can we as mayors of our town make it better?

We really worked through the basics of PBL and how we were going to incorporate it into our classrooms.

We decided on a final project. I was going to have my firsties write a letter, make a poster board, or use Frametastic (on iPad) to present to the mayor or town board. They needed to persuade (through opinion writing CCLS) the mayor or town board that whatever they had decided was the best thing to add to our community.

We did some research on other PBL samples and went through all the things that it covers. APPR (if you are in NY, this is something you should really look into!), CCLS, 21st Century Skills, and of course much more.

The last day was yesterday. I was so nervous to present my project to the rest of the class.

We used the Critical Friends Protocol.

It was so powerful. I was very nervous at first.

My "friends" gave me so much meaningful and purposeful ideas.

I am changing some of my project. Most of it is staying the same.

Come back tomorrow to see what my BRAND SPANKIN' NEW PBL project is!!!

Have a wonderful day!

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Project Based Learning Day 2

We had a week break in between the first two sessions. It was enough time for us to get our homework done and really think about our projects. 

The second day started out with us making a poster of our project.

Then we went around and did the activity "I like..., I wonder...". I did not realize how powerful this was until I sat down and reflected on my project and their critiques.

We had to sit down and look at all the sticky notes we had on our poster. 

These comments made me think more than if I reflected on it on my own.

POWERFUL!!!

These are the notes I took from my colleagues comments.

We talked about Voice and Choice and Building 21st Century Skills.

Then we were given some time to work on our projects.

I learned so much! I don't go back until January 16th. At that time, I am suppose to have almost everything done. I have a lot of work to do!

Have a wonderful day!!!

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Project Based Learning

I have been to two out of three sessions at our BOCES for Project Based Learning.

I LOVE it! (of course I get to spend all this time with one of my favorite people)

I will talk about Day 1 today.

Day 1

We looked at the standards I wanted to teach and cover in this project. 

We looked at the things that we teach throughout the year. This needs to be a broad subject. What could we take from Social Studies or Science and merge with everything else? It doesn't have to be a specific subject. I looked at Social Studies and Science because they contain the closest thing to units that I teach. It can be any subject area and any grade level.

It was hard to settle on one thing. I went back and talked to my colleagues about what they would want. We decided on community. I searched all the Social Studies standards that would be taught in a community unit. After I settled on these, I looked at "Driving Questions". I went through many. "How can we as mayors of Cazenovia make our town better?", "What makes Cazenovia a great place to live?", etc.. I finally found a pretty good one. "How can we, as members of the Cazenovia community, make our town better?".
I am pretty sure this is the one I am going to use, but it's not set in stone.

We researched other projects. This was amazing. There are so many great things out there!
This was as far as we got on Day 1.

We had homework to really get into the heart of our project...the standards.

If you want to check out the process, we have been following the Buck Institute for Education.

Click on the picture above to check it out!

Have a wonderful day!!!

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