Passion Projects

A couple of teacher friends of mine had talked about Passion Projects and I was intrigued. Does it not sound SO great to allow students to study their own passions and turn it into some type of presentation? I started where one of my friends said to start. That was on Teachers Pay Teachers. I stopped there and bought a couple of units. Feeling armed, I made a packet out of the two products I bought. It was a nice start, but I soon discovered I hadn’t given enough background information for a successful start. I had students who didn’t know what “passion” they wanted to pursue. I had other students who wanted to study sports or video games. At the time I asked them to let me think about it and that they better have a great way to learn something from these. A while later I went ahead and told them that sports and video games were off limits.

Then one of these teacher friends told me about this website and things started to take a turn for the better! Check out this post on using passion projects in elementary school at Keepemthinking.com. I really love the books this blogger suggests you start with– especially Junkyard Wonders. My students had such a great response to this book! I will update you in a several weeks to let you know how their projects are going.