“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” -Pablo Picasso
I believe that every child has infinite gifts to discover and share with the world. Empowering my students to apply their gifts to make meaningful contributions is my passion in life. So I am so excited to announce that students in our class is are about to begin Personal Interest Projects!
When doing a Personal Interest Project (P.I.P.), a student identifies an area of passion for the focus of a long term inquiry and that process culminates in the creation of a special product of learning. Students in our class will have time each week to work on their P.I.P.s, and they will present them during our class “P.I.P. Fair” in June.
Each student will choose his or her own topic and create something unique. For example, perhaps a student will work all year to write a graphic novel, create board game, start a small business selling artwork, create a podcast, design a line of fashions, invent a gadget, present a speech in a “TED Talk” format, or start a charity. Whatever a student chooses to do, the goal will be to take that project to the highest level of quality possible in the timeframe. Students should choose a topic and project idea they love and can feel truly represents who they are and their best work.
This P.I.P. journey will be a fun way for students to develop their core competencies and explore the learning standards all across the BC curriculum in personalized and meaningful ways—with powerful connections to the topics in grade 4 and 5 Language Arts, Career Ed., and Applied Design, Skills and Technology (ADST).
While a P.I.P. is an independent project, students will be well supported in class throughout the process. I will teach students to move through a structured ten-step P.I.P. process that I developed over the last 16 years as an educator. (I used to teach my P.I.P. course to students in private online gifted enrichment classes, so I have lots of instructional videos to correspond with each step of the P.I.P. process. I am happy that I will be able to share many of those videos with you here on the blog so you can follow long with our learning.)
*Here is a link to a video that I use to introduce the P.I.P. process: https://youtu.be/H_7kFC9eWV4
There will be more information about P.I.P.s and the 10-steps process in future blog posts.
For now, I wanted to let you know that this week our class will begin the first step of the P.I.P, and that is “Step 1: Find Your Passion”. This step helps students narrow an area of interest or passion, and we start by taking inventory of our areas of particular ability: our multiple intelligences. Here is a video I made to introduce the theory of multiple intelligences to students.
Video Link if the above embedded link does not work: https://youtu.be/6qn5114jz7g
Inquiry Ninja 