Personal project presentations take a long time. We devote three full mornings and an afternoon to watching student work. That could seem like a lot of instructional time - until you realize how much learning is going on in the audience. In the past week, the Herons have gotten a chance to learn about: Taylor Swift, The History of Mathematics, Dreams, Rubiks Cubes, Ancient China, Germany, Threats to the Ocean Ecosystem and How We Can Help, Dragon Fruit, Fears and Phobias, Sea Turtles, Optical Illusions, Music Therapy, World War 2, How Music Affects Animals, Fashion and Clothing Through the Past 100 Years, The Dark Meaning of Nursery Rhymes, Stop Motion Animation, How Greek and Roman Myths Affect the Western World, Hedgehogs, and Fishing. (And those are just the topics the Herons covered -- we also got to learn from the Robins and Kestrels!)
The students are engaged and curious. They ask great questions and they get excited about what they're learning. I know that I learn something new at every presentation and some of the students are learning about the very existence of some of these topics. What an amazing world we live in that has so many things to learn about. The project process gives students agency to pursue their own interests. The presentations cement students' sense of themselves as teachers as well as learners. The audience has an opportunity to wonder and imagine, too. I know that the seeds of future projects and themes are being planted.
On Monday morning, we celebrated being done with our projects by helping the Doves begin theirs! Each Dove brought books about the subject they were studying and their Heron bird buddy read the books to them. It was a chance for the Herons to see how far they'd come in the past six years. It was also a chance for the Herons to see how they had inspired their young partners to learn and teach.
In a school that doesn't use extrinsic rewards or grades, curiosity propels learning. The honors presentations and fourth grade presentations are catalysts for that curiosity -- not just for our grades but for the whole school all of whom come to some of the presentations. It is, indeed, time well spent.
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