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 things. Did my students know that dice are cubes? Did they know that cubes have six square sides? Could they connect the quantity of dots on each side to the total number of sides? Did they consider how to turn their pla

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 thinking about how labyrinths are designed. Then students generated questions such as, "Are we limited on materials? Who is our audience? Is there a time limit? What Toolkits can we use?" Later students defined constraints

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 throws all of those ideas out and replaces them with engaging activities where students are encouraged to work together, make mistakes, and discover multiple ways to solve a problem. This past week, first and second gra