DRIVING QUESTION:

How can we design and share a set of activities for kids to do at home while their parents are working?

Overview

Today children engage in all of the activities they generated in the previous day’s lesson.  Allow children the space to play, build, or try new ideas. The goal here is to “test” the activities to make sure they are ideas that children can do independently. You will also introduce two other criteria: the activities need to be fun, and need to last for longer than 30 minutes. 

Consider taking some pictures of the students engaging in independent work time for inclusion in their public product or to document the project process. If you are a teacher, you can use a platform like Flipgrid or Seesaw to help children document their ideas

Key Questions

• What are the best activities for kids to do at home? 

• Are these activities fun? 

• Do they last longer than 30 minutes?

Project Work Time: Investigation/Critical Thinking

Children look through the cards they created and begin to test them out. They go through each activity, using the following criteria as a guide to “assess” each activity for level of fun, duration, and level of independence. You can keep track of your findings on a chart or checklist like the checklist here.

Project Work Time: Math

Help children to time themselves and if needed, support them in how to write numbers to record time needed per activity. Determine how long the activity took. Then discuss whether the time is greater than or less than 30 minutes.  Does this activity meet the 30 minute criteria?  Could it be adjusted?

Checking for Understanding

By the end of the day, children should have one final list of approved activities. If you would like, you could include approximate timing for each. For example, “Building in Blocks” may have lasted 45 minutes. “Painting Rocks” for 32 minutes. Both are still good options. This information may be helpful later in the project when children describe the ideas for others.

Share Your Progress

Take a photo of children’s final list of suggested activities. If you want, children write down the number of minutes each activity takes.