The Writing Conservatory - Learn to Write Well

Articles:
Project-Led Learning

Daniel Yordy - Author

• The Home School - Project-Led Learning
  Should learning be wrapped around desk work, textbooks, and worksheets? Or would planting a garden, raising a horse, building a go-cart, or building a dog house serve far better to enable children to learn the academic stuff?
  
  
• Active Learning - The Only Option for the Middle School Student
  The middle school child should be learning about the world in which he or she lives. They should get their hands dirty. They should be making things, building things, fixing things, growing things, operating things, raising things. They should be running and shouting. They should be involved in large active projects that are both interesting and valuable to the people in their life.
  
  Project-Led Learning - What is It?
  In the past, age twelve was a special time in a child's life. It was the time when a child began to explore the work world of his or her heritage. The twelve-year-old was ready to learn the real work of adulthood, to be apprenticed to some trade, or to begin to shoulder real responsibilities. Project-led learning allows the home schooled junior high student to learn by doing rather than being chained to a desk for hours a day.
  
  
• Project-Led Learning - How Does it Work?
  Students at the seventh and eighth grade levels will do no regular academic courses. Their academics will come as necessary building blocks in a series of projects they will do. Don't be alarmed. As a classroom teacher, I can assure you that less real learning takes place in the classroom through these years than will happen in the heart and mind of a child exploring the world through projects.
  
  Project-Led Learning - Student Requirements
  How does a student integrate academic learning into the doing of projects during the junior high years? Reading books about the project, writing a journal, keeping accounts, working with tools, all these and more can sneak learning into the fun time of doing things.
  
  Project-Led Learning - Sample Projects
  If you have read some of my project-led learning articles and believe that project-led learning just might work for your child, I include here a list of possible project ideas under each of the ten learning categories. These are ideas only, you are more than welcome to use them or to extend these ideas to other similar things your child might be interested in doing.
  
  Project-Led Learning - A 12 Year Old Girl's Plan
  So you are intrigued by the concepts of project-led learning for your child? What would a year's set of projects look like for a particular student? I will share with you the layout that my eleven-year-old daughter presented me with and that I incorporated in the project-led learning model.
  
  
• Designing a Home School Project - Raising Rabbits
  Besides the joy of caring for and interacting with the rabbits themselves, my daughter is reading and writing about rabbits. She is learning practical research for present needs. She is designing the hutches and figuring amounts and costs. She is learning about rabbits in history and in their natural habitat. She is studying the anatomy and diseases of rabbits. She is studying rabbits in art. She is operating the tools and equipment needed to care for the rabbits, and she has the continual discipline of caring for those rabbits every single day.
  
  
• Designing a Home School Project - Writing Short Stories
  My daughter will begin her short story project with a list of action verbs printed off the Internet. She will obtain a copy of Katherine Langreish's "Troll Fell", open it anywhere, and start copying word for word. I will have her spend some time doing this, circling the action verbs and underlining the participle phrases. If you want to learn to write well, I suggest you do the same.
  
  
• Designing a Home School Project - Learning to Draw Sketches
  For this project, my daughter will produce two products. The first will be a portfolio of her work. This portfolio will show her learning of the art of drawing, and the particular development of a series of sketches that are her personal style or repertoire. Her art will focus on story book animals in general and cutesy rabbits in particular. Her second project will be a series of finalized sketches that she will fit into her children's picture-book story about rabbits.