Project Overview

As children return to in-person learning, there are still many COVID restrictions on visitors to campuses. This presents an authentic, challenging problem. How might children share their new classrooms with their families? How can care-givers see the environment, the recent work and materials, and create a strong home/school connection?

In this project, children choose the areas of the classroom they are most excited about sharing with their families. They create a classroom map, a presentation script, and make a video or take photos of the different areas of the room they wish to share, highlighting the purposes of those areas or materials. The video is shared with families at Back-to-School Night.

While usual PBL units last several weeks, this “Pop-Up Project” is only one week. It includes most of the key elements of a PBL unit, just in a condensed amount of time. This provides a nice introduction to PBL for your students, and the simplicity of the project is easy to manage for teachers. At the same time, the unit empowers our youngest learners to have ownership, agency and independence in their learning as they begin the new year.