Genius Hour and My First Blog Post!

I'm sure by now most of you have heard the buzz word floating around the teacher sphere, Genius Hour. You may be asking yourself what Genius Hour is and how it will benefit your students. I'm here to share with you how I made it work in my 5th grade classroom. I'll warn you now that I tend to be a bit of a rule breaker when it comes to trends like this, so if you've read and read about Genius Hour and think I'm nuts, then that's alright! Take what parts of this you like and throw out the rest. 

To start, I went to the best place to find anything and everything, Pinterest! I did a simple search on Pinterest and up came TONS of links and teachers' blogs who have implemented it with success in their own classrooms! I was floored and also a little overwhelmed! I sat down and decided to take it one step at a time. I started with how I would introduce it to my students. 

I will admit right away that I did a lot to introduce GH to my students because I really wanted them to buy into the idea of creating something entirely on their own.


My introduction started with this video of the Kid President giving a 'pep talk'. My students always love a good Kid President video, so I thought it would be a great intro! 

Next came a book of course! My teacher heart soared when I was browsing B&N for books one afternoon and stumbled upon this fantastic book that fit right in with the idea of GH! 
What more could you ask for than a book all about sticking with ideas and turning them into something great?!

Finally, after I felt like I really had their attention, I had them watch this video by Big Brain Academy. It really does a great job of explaining to students exactly what Genius Hour will look like for them.

Once I finished introducing them to the idea I thought it would be great to give them some examples of student GH projects. Boy was this hard! I had never done any projects with my students, so I had none to show as an example. I did what any other teacher does. I hit Pinterest, Youtube, and Instagram for ideas. I showed my students all sorts of ideas and then gave them a graphic organizer to start brainstorming! 

If you are looking for the materials to start Genius Hour in your classroom, I strongly suggest checking out Literacy for Big Kids TPT store. She has the most incredible resource for GH! I used her entire packet and it honestly saved me from muddling through trying to create my own materials! 
Link to her store:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Genius-Hour-Classroom-Materials-Teacher-Student-1713126

Finally, we can talk about management! WHEW! This first post is a doozy! I hope you are hanging in there!  
I put my students' materials in a folder with their number on it and that is where they kept all of their materials that they would need each hour we worked. We kind of cheated the system (I warned you earlier that I don't like to follow all of the rules). We didn't do it one hour a week like other people that I researched. We were short on time because I started this project after spring break right in the midst of state testing and end of year testing. We were in crunch mode! We ended up working on it whenever we had a spare 30 minute time block. Some weeks it was twice a week and some weeks we only got to it for 30 minutes that whole week! I don't think it so much matters that you commit to the full hour each week. My biggest challenge with only having 30 minutes is that I couldn't pull my students away. They wanted to keep working! (Not a bad problem to have!)

Let me share a little story from this experience that may convince you to give it a whirl this year.

I had a few stubborn gooses this year and I thought that this would be a difficult task for them because they struggled with reading and comprehension, which is pretty much what skills you need to be able to research and write about a topic. I was NERVOUS! I took the leap anyway. I was right though. I faced some challenges. One of my students started out on a project and became frustrated and refused to work (my biggest fear!). I found out that his topic wasn't something he was PASSIONATE about! We switched his topic from baseball, which he had never played to Clash of Clans. When you get to tell a kid that generally struggles with school, that he can research information on game design and create a presentation of a beginner vs an expert gamer to share with his classmates, you are going to have one engaged student! It was incredible! He ended up succeeding by putting together a powerpoint presentation on game design and Clash of Clans. He researched its development and who created it, how many people play the game, and what went into making the game. For his project, he built a game from scratch and instructed the class on how to make it to expert level. I was one proud teacher!


If you are interested in learning more on Genius Hour, I am attaching a link to my Pinterest page where I have pinned a lot of informational pages about Genius Hour. 
https://www.pinterest.com/jazzyjay/genius-hour/


Good Luck! 
Small Town Miss Browne

I'm finally a blogger!

Hip Hip Hooray! I am finally a blogger (kind of)! 

I am making many goals for myself for the upcoming school year and one thing that I wanted to accomplish was to launch my own teacher blog.  Finally, after lounging around by the pool all summer, I decided to get it together and start checking things off my list.

Fellow teacher friends, I introduce you to Small Town Miss Browne. This blog will contain many different teaching tips along with a few of my classroom blunders that you can learn from.

I hope that as the year goes on that I can gain more followers and help my fellow teacher friends like they have helped me so many times over the past few years.