Reflection 3

In a classroom, with any project planning there must be a big idea to base it off of. While trying to do this, one must find out exactly what the big idea is. You have to identify what the main concepts are, what you want your students to understand and why the concepts are important. Once you've done this, you can begin thinking of application and relevance for students and real life applications. Once you've thought about these things, it's a good idea to discuss them with your colleagues.
A well put together project will evolve your students using 21st century skills and access them to the higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy. Students will analyze, evaluate, and create! Your project should challenge students to do them all. Along with those students should access the 21st century literacies. The project should naturally involve students learning to become independent, aware and productive. Within different contexts, students should be able to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute.
There are several essential learning functions that students should accomplish. Ubiquity is not exactly a learning function but it supports project learning just the same. It is being able to learn all the time, inside and outside the classroom. Deep learning pushes students beyond raw information and require students to engage in higher order thinking. Making things visible and discussable enables students to use their mind to examine things versus just telling. There is a visible representation. Expressing ourselves, sharing ideas and building community includes students using tools to express their ideas and build a society around interests. They share their ideas and have social interaction. Collaboration invite students to learn together, plan and write together and grow together. Research involves students using the web but being able to use filters, citations, and organizing information. Project management helps students manage time, work, sources, feedback from peers and teachers, and other organizational tools. Lastly, reflection and iteration refers to being able to reshape and reconsider ideas. Students could use blogs to express these drafts of works and continue to polish them.
All of these elements relate to our project because it shows us how to start. We know the steps and what to look for/keep in mind while designing this project. Kitchen classrooms can be very fun for the children and with the proper steps, we can create an effective environment for 21st century skills and literacies to be accessed.