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In our “Reading Lists” we collect the tastiest articles, podcast episodes, and videos from the Unboxed archives for your enjoyment and edification!
This collection is called “true project stories” because it’s all about teachers (and students) telling the stories of the projects they’ve done, from the heights of achievement to the depths of despair.
We’ve split this one up into elementary school, middle school, and high school, to make it easy for you to find the story you want.
Podcast: Everybody Needs a Rock (Kindergarten geology project)
When Rosemarie Biocarles-Rydeen’s students started selling their pokémon collections to buy rocks, she knew it was time to turn her class’s rock obsession into a project!
Listen to this episode to find what PBL can look like in kindergarten (it looks pretty awesome).
Article: RockOn (A fourth grade Virtual Reality Geology Project)
Kari Shelton wasn’t totally convinced when she was asked if her students would be interested in testing out virtual reality equipment—she wanted them to get outside, not look at more screens.
Read this article to find out how her students used virtual technology in order to engage more deeply with the (real) natural world.
Article: A Room of Our Own (Fourth Grade Writing and Papercutting Project on Immigration)
Briony Chown’s students made intricate paper cuttings telling the stories of people who immigrated to California, based on interviews with the people themselves.
Read this article to learn about why checklists were the secret to this project’s success (and to see some beautiful student artwork!)
Podcast: Ablegamerz (a sixth grade math/science/english project)
Teachers Corey Clark, Curtis Taylor & Matt Gottilla tapped into the excitement of videogames for this project, in which students designed and built adaptive video game controllers for clients with a variety of disabilities.
Article: It Takes a Village to Raise a Writer (8th grade writing project)
A year into the pandemic, Al Qamar academy, in Chennai, India, launched a creative writing project. In the words of the author, “This is a narrative of how a community came together to mentor children into becoming authors.”
Article: “Wild About Cramlington” by Darren Mead (8th grade ornithology project)
In the north of England, a few teachers and scientists got a bunch of eighth-graders excited about birdwatching. Find out how.
Article: Logs from San Diego Bay, by Tom Ferenbacher (11th grade humanities and biology project)
This project that spanned several years, in which students wrote and published a series of guidebooks to San Diego Bay, each one focusing on a different aspect of the ecology.
Article: Learning Behind the Lens (11th grade documentary film project)
A documentary film project focused on local “ecological landmarks.” What makes this especially cool is that it’s written not by a teacher, but by one of the students who took part in the project.
Podcast: In XONR8, 11th graders are helping to free wrongfully-convicted prisoners (11th grade humanities project)
In this project, eleventh graders screened applications to the California Innocence Project from incarcerated people who say they were wrongfully convicted and want the Innocence Project to take their case.
The podcast episode tells the story of the project from launch to exhibition, from the perspective of the teacher and two students.
Podcast: Project Files: The Syrian Refugee Simulation, with Dany Francis (11th grade humanities project)
Full disclosure: this was my project. It was incredibly stressful at the time, and I kept thinking about it for years after—so I got together with one of the students who’d taken a leadership role, and we talked about the whole thing—from the highest highs to the lowest lows.
Here are some more great articles about projects:
For even more inspiration, check out Changing the Subject, a collection of projects spanning the first twenty years of High Tech High
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