Day 2: Brainstorm Your Interests
Once they're all PUMPED UP from the video, do a brainstorming activity to give students ideas about what to research.
This Brainstorming Page on Teachers Pay Teachers will help! Surprisingly, brainstorming was kind of challenging for my fourth graders. This graphic organizer is another great tool to help students generate ideas. Have the students write down as many topics as they can think of. The more they have to think of later, the better!
Sometimes busting this brainstorming activity out a couple times for short periods of time allows students to think of more topics. Inspiration helps. See if you can get community members to come in and share about their jobs or skills. Here are a few websites students may choose to browse to get inspired:
Extension Idea: If you keep all of the Genius Hour materials in a folder or something, have students make a Wordle with all of their topics of interest. The Wordle can be on the front cover of their folder! This way, the folder looks cool AND if you do more than one Genius Hour project, students will quickly have another idea for what to research.
My students always have a hard time coming up with topics, so this is helpful, thanks!
ReplyDeleteThe brainstorming page really helps, so does exposing them to different ideas with those websites. Let me know how they do this year, or if you come across any other good sites!
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