My favorite PBL website was the 1st grade PBL called "My Healthy Self" (URL: http://www.dukeschool.org/files/My%20Healthy%20Self%20Project.pdf). I chose this project as my favorite because it was an important topic that often gets left out of the curriculum in schools (especially with the lack of funding to pay for health/PE teachers). I also really liked how students were able to pursue a direction that they were interested in (i.e. if a student wanted to test how many sit-ups they could do then they could run an experiment, while another student may be taking samples of the average temperatures of their classmates). The final aspect of this project that I liked was that the students got to experience many different aspects of healthy living in this unit. They were able to pursue areas that they had an interest in and they also participated in activities as a class (i.e. using the computer to learn about nutrition, learning yoga from an instructor and visiting a grocery store). It seems as though the broad range of activities that were included into this unit helped the students to retain the information long after the unit ended.
In this unit students are being exposed to higher levels of thinking such as analysis and evaluation. Students are able to analyze their findings from different experiments (i.e. number of sit-ups a group of students could complete) and figure out how this may be reflective of the number of sit-ups that the whole class may be able to complete. Students are also able to evaluate and make judgements based on their findings. For example, when students visited the grocery store they are able to make judgements on the packaging of healthy food versus non-healthy foods and analyze why there may be differences.
I would not change anything about this PBL unit.
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