
Roll the Dice: Kindergarten Explorations
It all began when one student announced, “Let’s make our own dice!” This moment is what I live for as a Kindergarten teacher. No other plans are as important as the opportunity to dive head first into a student’s curiosity...especially when there is limitless learning potential for the rest of my class! I invited my student to make some observations of different dice and to draw up a plan. He consulted with others who supported his plan. I immediately wondered so many thin

Learning Labyrinths
21st Century Skills: Critical Thinking Creativity Communication Collaboration Adaptability Problem Solving This year the Adventure Room group kicked off the year with a design challenge: building a hand-held labyrinth! One of the reasons for this design challenge was to provide students with an opportunity to explore and use the Design Thinking Toolkit. Students started by making observations, a key step in our process, as it sparked student excitement and invited critical th

A YouCubed Math Experience
In the beginning of the school year, all of my students created first semester goals. One student proudly told me that her goal was to work on math and solve problems. Later on she confessed to me that she wanted to work on math, but didn’t really like math. Many students see math as an subject where they are not allowed to make mistakes, a subject where there is only one right answer, also don’t work together, because that would be cheating. The beauty of YouCubed is that it