kinderGATE Home        Resources        Standards        Inspiration        About the Author

KinderGATE: PBL in the Kindergarten Classroom

My sense is that most of the traffic to this site will be future Touro University Innovative Learning masters candidates, so I'd like to welcome you to my site and offer you any assistance that I can. My contact info is on the About the Author page. My best piece of advice is to read this book by by Anne Lamott. I read it years ago, and it has helped me through many a rough patch in life. It's helping me now. How are you going to learn all this technology? How are you going to understand the "Epistemology of Education" article? How are you going to know what Dervin is talking about? What are all those acronyms in the TPACK graphic? What is a Weebly? What is a bit.ly? How do I get the sound to work on my Blackboard? What was I thinking!!?? Didn't I have enough on my plate just trying to be a good, full-time teacher? How am I going to survive this? The answer lies below....bird by bird. 
If you have landed here because you would like to learn more about project based learning, then welcome, willkomennen, and bienvenue; so would I! I am still learning how to employ the project based learning method of teaching in my kindergarten classroom, but after years of studying this question, I do have a few things to share. My journey is not over. I am sure that five years from now I will be wishing "I-knew-then-what-I-know -now", but that is the point really. Education is a journey, and it should be a joy. I am a life-long learner, and I didn't get to be that way by accident. I come from a long line of teachers who knew that "the  question was the thing", not the answer. I clearly remember my father telling me when I was struggling with picking a major in college that you go to school "to learn how to learn". It didn't matter what my major was, really, he told me. What mattered was that I learned how to find the answers to my questions. It seems so simple now, but American education has completely turned its back on this philosophy until very recently with the adoption of the Common Core State Standards. Teachers now need to make a paradigm shift. I'd like to think that I can be of a little help with that, but first, as Yoda says, "You must unlearn what you have learned."
The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveler who arrives 
at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament.

PBL Timeline in Powtoon

Driving Questions and Essential Questions

Using Community Experts

Designing for Collaboration

Developing 21st Century Skills

Differentiating Instruction, Voice and Choice and UDL

Presentation skills, Written and Oral Communication, and the Digital Toolkit

Digital Citizenship

Reflection