Planning a Dream Vacation...in 4th Grade
Last year, as part of my math workshop, I decided to create a project based learning (PBL) activity. Actually, it was my teaching partner's idea, so I'll have to give her the credit (thank you Brittney!). If you are not familiar with math workshop (or math centers, rotations, etc.), it is math instruction that is taught in different centers. There is a lot of different ways that it looks...and I'll have a blog post in the future about what exactly mine looks like in my classroom and what works for me. For now, I'll keep it based on the project based learning that is taking place as one of the centers.
Everyday, students work on a PBL activity during math instruction. In the past, this rotation has been games, which could get a little out of hand depending on the group of students who were playing the game. However, because of PBL, it goes a lot smoother and it also promotes higher level thinking--an even bigger bonus.
Starting the school year, I was a little unsure of what the PBL activity was going to be for at least the first few months of school. I had just started PBL last school year, during the second half, so I had no resources to pull from. After doing some research online and reaching out to colleagues on Twitter, I found some math related resources. Because my students work on this independently during math, I wanted an activity that was engaging, in addition to students being able to work on this without much support from me.
I came across some resources and ideas based on planning a dream vacation. In these resources, students were given some type of budget to plan a vacation for themselves and whoever they wanted to take with them. They had to determine their location and identify all the costs of traveling, including airfare, accommodations and entertainment.
I decided that this was the perfect PBL activity to start with, especially because I knew the students would be very interested in planning their own dream vacation. To kick off the dream vacation, I explained all of the different components students would be researching to plan their vacation. We spent a couple days exploring on Google Maps so students could identify exactly where they wanted to go. They had to identify the city, state and country before moving on.
I spent time modeling how to locate airline tickets, hotel reservations and entertainment costs and developed a planning sheet for my students to use. There were planning resources available online through different sites, but I wanted to make sure it was "fourth grade friendly" for my students, so we developed it together.
Currently, students are still working on planning their vacations. They are creating an itinerary for their trip so they can plan out each day of the vacation. The final product will be some sort of multimedia presentation that they will share with the class. Below are the resources I used as my inspiration for this project. I've also included the document that I created for students to plan their vacations. Happy travels!
Dream Vacation Planning Sheet
