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How to Design a PBL Unit for the Kindergarten Level
Incorporating CCSS of reading informational text into your social studies and science curriculum through Project Based Learning.
Incorporating CCSS of reading informational text into your social studies and science curriculum through Project Based Learning.
This short Powtoon tutorial covers the basic outline of creating a Project and the key components your project should include.
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Here's What it Looks Like in the Classroom
In my classroom, we create global awareness by studying different countries. So far we have virtually traveled to England, France, Italy, Japan, China, Hawaii (ancient to present), Spain, Mexico and the USA. I use the term kinder to refer to children from transitional kindergarten to first grade, as we are a small school and my classroom configuration has been subject to change based on our yearly enrollment. All of the children in this video are 6 or younger. If you are amazed at their reading skills, take that as evidence of the richness of literacy instruction when you incorporate CCSS of reading informational text into your social studies and science curriculum through Project Based Learning.
If you are wondering about the varying reading skill levels in the classroom after a year of PBL in the afternoon and explicit literacy instruction in the morning including Houghton Mifflin, the Soundabet program for phonics, and the Strategic Instruction In Phonic and Phonemic Awarness (SIPPS) program, then check out our finished product. We made a green screened film by taking a coloring book titled, The Story of Hawaii, and each kinder read one to three pages of the book to tell the story. This was where I was able to build voice and choice into the unit as we drew names using popsicle sticks and kinders took turns choosing a page they would like to color and make flash cards for the film. Their colored page became the backdrop for the green screen. The parents helped them memorize their lines, and we also had peer review when they were practicing reading their cards out loud. This did not happen over night. There was a lot of rigor to this unit and kids were exposed to rich vocabulary in context as you will see. We had fun, and we worked very, very hard.
Here is "The Story of Hawaii"
You can see that the techology utilized for this unit, filming with green screening, has truly been used as an aide to support the learning and assist and extend the presentation skills of the kinders. We are not learning green screening to add another "cool tool" to our toolkit. We are using technology to help us communicate in a way that would be more difficult, but not impossible, without it. You could do this same PBL unit without the green screening feature, but the addition of the filming enabled us to have multiple takes and to reduce the kinders' performance anxiety because they got to "try again" if they made mistakes with the magic of film. You can imagine how many of the kinders would not have been able to be heard or may have even froze if we did this on stage rather than on film. We were able to hit the "sweet spot" described in TPACK with this unit as our content, my pedagogy, and technology came together.
