Genius Hour Blog - Week 4

Hello Friends!

    Welcome back to 'Teaching with Miss G'. It is great to see you back and I hope your week has been smooth, fun, and full of learning! Thank you for joining me for week four 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, my second post by clicking here and last week's post 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. To make these posts a bit easier to read, moving forward I will only link to the last week I posted (so please note this change if you are sharing these posts at any point). So, without further adieu, let's get into week 4!

    Last 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 the past few research sessions, 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). 

    In addition to a review of UDL and some further research in theory, last week I also began looking into activities that could be adjusted and used within the classroom to meet the goals of my guiding question. I found a wealth of resources online to inspire my final product: a resource guide for educators looking to implement UDL for language arts within their classrooms. A few of the activities I found included: sight word Jenga, sight word and vocabulary hopscotch, and phonics bingo. These activities inspired me to work toward creating some of my own activities to incorporate into my final product.

    This week, I took a trip to the good-old Dollarama (our main dollar store here in Canada) and searched for some items I could use to develop trial activities for my guide. Some of the items I purchased include: solo cups, ping pong balls, labels, stamps, stickers, letter blocks, cue cards, and a soccer ball. Over the course of the next week, I plan to put these activities together and test them with students that I work with. All of the students I currently work with are of different age ranges, have varying interests, and a few of them are currently receiving Special Education Support at school (i.e. on an Individualized Education Plan). 

    By the end of the week, I hope to put all of my final activities into a brief resource guide for educators to use to implement UDL into their language arts lessons. My plan to is to have a guide outlining UDL in better detail and how different means of representation, action, and expression into the modern classroom (both virtually and in-person). I will also incorporate some digital learning activities for teachers that may be working exclusively or partially online. 

    Please stay tuned for next week's post as I will be sharing my first draft of the resource guide here on this blog! As always, please post any questions or comments you may have below. :) 

I would love to hear from you!

Until next time, 

Emily