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= **Project Overview** = **[|Oneco's Gifted Website]** Sometimes the best lessons don’t come from our plan books, and our first experience with Challenge Based Learning has been just that. Challenge Based Learning requires students work collaboratively to solve a real world problem. With these challenges the students work on variety of academic skills on a much deeper level. The framework to this curriculum consist of the following: -**Big Idea:** a broad concept that can be narrowed down by asking questions and exploring its different aspects. -**Essential Question(s)**: Comes out of the Big Idea and helps identify what is important and helps narrow down the topic and define the idea. -**The Challenge**: Comes out of the essential question(s) and students are asked to create a solution that can result in a measurable action or actions. -**Guiding Questions:** These questions are generated by the students and are based on what they need to know to solve the problem. -**Guiding Activities:** Activities to help students solve their problem and to gather resources. -**Solution(s):** Should be student generated, require student action, be thoughtful, clear, concrete and publishable in one form or another.  I had been investigating Challenge Based Learning for several months to use in a project later in the year with grades four and five. However, to my surprise the journey with CBL started with a group of third grade girls on their very first day together this year. We were sharing the book //The English Roses// by Madonna. This is a very sweet book about a group of girls that excludes another girl due to their jealousy and how the girls learn that behavior was wrong. Afterward, the girls began discussing their issues with the same problem of cliques and how girls hurt each other. As the conversation continued, it turned to where they had seen the same theme on TV and in the movies. Finally, they came to the question "What are we going to do about it?" At that point, we visited the [|CBL Website] together and started working our way through the process.

Since our challenge was not planned and sprang from a class discussion on a book we had read, we had already decided "The Big Idea," "The Essential Question" and "The Challenge" by the time we began to look at the [|CBL Website]. Honestly, the girls had so much to say about the subject that their challenge truly came from their personal experiences. This meant we were ready to start working on our Guided Questions and Activities. Honestly, at first we were not very organized, so at one point we gathered together and used Kidspiration to map out our plan of attack [|(Project Map)].

We invite you to follow our progress here on our wiki, through our podcast series [|"Gabbing with the Gifted-3rd Grade Edition"] and [|our teacher's blog.]

If you would like to contact us please email our teacher at snyderf@fc.manatee.k12.fl.us.