Genius Hour Blog - Week 3
Hello Friends!
Welcome back to 'Teaching with Miss G'. It is great to 'see you' again and I hope it has been a great week for you in your part of the world! Thank you for joining me for week three of my Genius Hour Project series. For those of you who have yet to read my first few posts, I recommend checking those out in order to fully understand what's going on in this week's blog post. You can view my first post by clicking here and my second post by clicking here. Reading the first few posts in this series will help you follow along with all that I will be discussing in today's entry. So, without further adieu, let's get into week 3!
This week, I completed the second half of my research for my Genius Hour Project Series. As you know, this series is operating under the guiding question: How can I, as a future educator, integrate literacy strategies into the classroom that equally benefit all types of learners? During last week's research session, I found a remarkable theory to help guide my practice in achieving the answer to my question: Universal Design for Learning (UDL). As a quick refresher, UDL is best known as an approach to learning that gives all students within a classroom equal opportunity to succeed. If you are interested in learning a bit more about UDL, Understood.org provides an excellent explanation (you can read that here).
My goal for this week was to begin researching potential products that could be integrated into the language arts classroom under the principles of UDL. Ultimately, my hope is to find inspiration through this research and find adaptable activities that can meet the needs of all learners within my classroom. So, I took to Pinterest and began to look for integrative, adaptable language arts activities. Here are a few I found:
1) Sight Word Jenga!
Found on: https://abcsofliteracy.com/beginning-sounds-bingo-game/
3) Sight Word Hopscotch
From this research (and some of the inspiring activities shown above), I was able to determine the product that I would like to create as the take-away piece from this Genius Hour Series. I will be creating a resource guide under the principles of Universal Design for Learning to support educators in integrating adaptable and inclusive activities into their literacy lesson plans. Prior to now I was having some trouble determining whether I would simply create some different adaptable activities or try to adapt pre-existing activities for this Genius Hour Project. My research this week has helped me to determine that I can combine both ideas into a resource guide by exploring how to adapt activities to meet the needs of all learners within the classroom, while keeping everyone engaged.
This leads me to my guiding questions for next week:
1) How will I create this UDL-inspired literacy resource guide? Will I use Canva, Microsoft Word, Publisher?
2) While I plan to test the products outlined in my guide with students I tutor, how will I measure the success of my products? Qualitative interviews with my students, observations?
3) What will adaptations of my products look like? Should I come up with one consistent model for all products to follow?
I will continue to explore these questions over the next week as I start producing products (activities) for my final product, the future educator resource guide. My hope is that by next week, I will have all activities (products) that will be included in the guide, found or created. I will spend the week following testing products with my students in order to determine their success and whether they should be included in my final future educator resource guide.
Well, that is all for now! If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for this project, please drop them below. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts. :)
Hi Emily,
ReplyDeleteSTAR 2 - I really like how you included integrative, adaptable language arts activities and provided links and visuals for each. I find your blog very information packed and you included very useful tips. Great work!