For our last few weeks of GATE (except next week when we have a special guest instructor!) the 5th graders will be working on a Genius Hour project. Genius Hour was made popular by innovative companies such as Google that encourage their employees to spend up to 20% of their work time, developing a passion project. In fact, this is how Gmail was created!

The students are working through the 5 stages of Genius Hour: Choose a topic, develop a research question, perform meaningful research, create a project, and share your findings and experience. This week, students completed steps 1 and 2 and at least got a good lead on step 3. Next week, we will have a special guest teacher working with us on some environmental science. The following two weeks will be used for finishing research on completing the project portion, and the final GATE class will be for sharing projects, reflecting, and celebrating an amazing year of GATE!