Not a Box Genius Hour -- Week 4

This is the picture our teacher has shown us all week as her desktop background:

Photo Credit: Princess and the Rock

We started out this week's genius hour by listening to the story "Simon and His Boxes" by Gilles Tibo.

In the story, Simon wants to build houses for animals.  But the animals don't want to live in the homes he creates for them.  So, he finds something else to do with the boxes.  It was interesting to see Simon construct things as well as see the details that he added.

 

Reading this story helped us to think about more possibilies of what we could do with our "Not a Box" projects.  We were excited to hear that today we would get to plan our projects!

 

The first step was for each of us to spend some time thinking, drawing and writing about what we would like to create. 

 

After spending some time planning on our own, it was time to get together with our group.  Most of us are in groups of 3, but there are a couple groups of 4.  We each shared our own ideas with our group and then put our heads together to come up with our group idea.  This proved to be quite hard, since each of us already had an idea of what we wanted to do individually.  Many of our groups talked about trying to use everyone's ideas as part of the group plan, but then we found out that we were only allowed to create one project, not 3 separate ones. 

 

After more discussion, we worked towards agreeing on a project and then planning it out by writing about what we will be creating, what materials we will need and what our creation's purpose or job will be. 

 

Today was hard work (harder than we thought it would be), but we're excited to be moving forward!

 

Up next...construction!

 

We were wondering...

What would you create as a "not a box" project?

What kind of materials would you use?