30 PBL Ideas for Young Children: Welcome to our New Project Bank!

I co-host a Facebook Group where over 5,000 educators from around the world share project ideas, resources and questions about implementing Project Based Learning with young children. For the past three years, I have enjoyed posting stories and photographs of PBL from my own classroom of 4 and 5 year-olds - examples of young children generating deep questions, engaging in field work, participating in feedback protocols and presenting their work to the wider community. The purpose of the group (which really coincides with the purpose of all of my work now as an early childhood PBL educator) is to highlight the many ways that young children can engage successfully in PBL, and to support early childhood teachers and school leaders in knowing that it is not only possible, but PBL is the most joyful, empowering approach to learning in any context. As early childhood educators, we need to see examples of PBL in order to dispel some of our potential assumptions and misconceptions about how to plan and implement projects with our youngest learners. 

Last year, after ending my 17th year as a teacher, I decided to transition out of the classroom. While this decision was not hard to make - I had felt ready to shift my focus to instructional coaching and facilitating professional development for several years - this fall, I have experienced a feeling of loss not being in the classroom.  I’ve missed being able to share examples from my teaching in the Facebook group as a way to elevate all that young children are able to do in PBL. There is nothing quite like the surprise that happens during a PBL unit, where young children exceed your expectations or bring something new to the table - and I have really missed sharing those incredible examples of PBL in our group. 

Last week in a workshop I facilitated, a teacher asked: Is there one place to find kindergarten-friendly driving questions and projects? I had to tell her that sadly, there really wasn’t. While you can find a number of examples on the PBLWorks Project library, and we host a blog that features many projects teachers have done (along with the driving questions), there isn’t really a simple, good, one-stop shop for PBL ideas for early childhood. And then I realized, maybe I can just start one. 

Over the course of my 17 years as a teacher (Transitional Kindergarten through second grade), I have done many projects. In my early years as a teacher, I worked in a school that had a year-long theme, so we did smaller projects that led to one large product at the end of the year. Later, I worked in schools where I did three PBL units per year, one per trimester. That’s a lot of projects. And (this is a question I often get asked), I’ve rarely repeated the same project twice. 

At Early Childhood PBL, we have tried a few times to collect teachers’ projects to create this kind of bank and house a bunch of ideas. We’ll keep trying, because we know that there are many incredible early childhood teachers out there doing projects, day-by-day, year after year. So in an attempt to get things rolling with our bank, here’s my first deposit - a list of projects I’ve done (in no particular order other than it is the order in which I can remember them!). It was fun to revisit these after many years, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with our ECPBL community. Although I’m not currently in the classroom, these children and these projects very much still live within me each day, as I work with teachers around the world.

A quick caveat: no project is perfect. Some of these driving questions and public products could use some revision. My projects improved over the years, and there are always things I look back on and wish I could have done differently. Rather than seeing this list as some kind of “exemplar” for project ideas, my hope is that it inspires you to come up with more ideas - ideas that your students will love and engage with and that will work in your community. I also hope this list gives you hope and encouragement, and allows you to see the power and possibility that lies in every project we design and facilitate with young children.

Here is a sample of some of the projects highlighted in our current project bank. We hope you’ll visit, draw on the ideas, and even add your own. We hope that this will be an ever-expanding resource for early childhood educators who are excited to bring PBL to their children.