Part of the project is that all the students are required to blog about their project and all the things that they are doing. Here is where you can find there blogs.
Students are naturally inquisitive and they have some amazing thoughts and questions. In class, one of the students asked "What is a Passion Project?" I know. Great question cause I am sort of asking the same thing. Well a Passion Project is developing a project around something that you are excited or interested in. This is what some of my students think passion is.
My name is Mr. Laythorpe(Jeff) and I am an elementary teacher in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I teach a grade 4 class that is taking on a big project this year and we call it our Passion Project.
The idea came from a chance meeting last school year with a guy by the name of Kevin Brookhouser. What Kevin talked about was this 20% time project that he discovered in doing some research about Google. You see Google gives their employees a lot of amazing benefits but they also provide them with a chance to work on a project of their choice and allow them the time and resources to work on this project. This is how some things like PayPal and Gmail came to fruition.
Kevin, took this sort of thinking and applied it to his high school english class. Hey let's be honest anyway you can beef up high school english your going to take the chance am I right? Anyhow, Kevin asked his students to dedicate one day of their week to focus on something of interest and create a year long project about it. The results well they where simply amazing. Here are some of the ideas that came from it.
After, meeting Kevin and then coughing up $20 to get his book about this awesome class adventure. I was inspired to try a similar project with my grade four students.
Am I worried as to how this is going to work out? Absolutely.
Is it going to be tiring? for sure!
Is it worth it? YES.
This has the chance to really make an impact with my students. I can't wait to see how it goes.
