I just recently started doing Genius Hour in my classroom, thanks to Don Wettrick and Jen Schneider at LF. Many of my students had great success in coming up with an awesome project and starting it. I had one student who completed his entire project....I wrote up the following and sent it out to people in my building, tech leaders, newspapers, and the person in charge at the Open Door Mission Donations Center:
My class does a project called Genius Hour in which they choose a topic to research and figure out a project to do displaying their knowledge and/or passion. I have a student named Donnie Cox who researched literacy rates among children and adults across the world. He was passionate about books...and getting them into the hands of everyone...no matter age race or socioeconomic status.
His project idea was to do a school wide book drive. He set everything up with the help of our student council. They promoted and ran the even for two weeks this May. He researched places to donate the books to and chose the Omaha Children's Hospital and Open Door Mission/Lydia House.
Through Donnie's hard work and the amazing effort of our school, we were able to collect over 2,500 new and gently used books to donate!!! Today we had a couple families volunteer to take the books to the hospital and Open Door Mission. The pictures are attached. I want to get the word out that one kid...one person CAN make a difference. I am so proud of Donnie and just wanted to spread the news to all willing to hear it. The Open Door Mission took pictures and wanted to post them to their Facebook page.
Thanks for letting me boast about my amazing student!
Here is Donnie among the 2,500 books collected!
Here is Donnie at the Open Door Mission about to donate our books
At Open Door Mission, we filled an entire pallet box!