Genius Hour Resources

I recently did a webinar with the my friend, Angela Gadtke from @Seesaw.  We talked about how awesome Seesaw is to use with Genius Hour.  We've both taught Genius Hour in primary grades (Angela in kindergarten and myself in first grade) this past year.  During the webinar, someone asked what my favorite websites were to use to support my students' researching.  I have to be honest, I was not prepared for the question, and after a 12 hour day, and 2 weeks of recovering from pneumonia, I was shot.
So, I am posting my favorite sources tonight! :)

If you have students researching animals, here are my top 3 choices:
National Geographics - Kids

A-Z Animals

San Diego Zoo for Kids

If your students are looking for projects to make, here are a few sites:
DIY - for kids

Instructables

You Tube -You may find videos for your students yourself, but remember to put it into SafeShareTV for them to view safely.

I will post a few other resources my students are trying out for me - after we use them.  We are trying a more guided Genius Hour project for our first project this year, so my students know HOW and WHAT to report and share.  I will post samples of their work this next week, as they are working on their projects on Monday.  They are very anxiously waiting for Monday to come!  They were able to choose any animal to research.  I modeled the process with bats.  We wrote on post-it notes (thank you, 3M!!!) and put our notes in columns - CAN, ARE, HAVE.  As we learned NEW information through reading books, we added new post-it notes with the info. listed, but the post-it notes were of a different color.  This helps my students visually see we learn new information. Next week we will look at our notes and see if some of our original ideas of bats were true or false.  If the notes were false, they will be eliminated.

At the end of each working session, I will have my students take a picture of their journals and talk about what they learned that particular day, and what their next step would be.  This is something I was missing last year, and I learned from Angela.  Webinars, Twitter chats and other blogs are great ways to learn from each other!
Keep learning and keep moving forward! :D