We (4th and 5th grade) have been itching to flip our classrooms ever since we got our Chromebooks this year.  We have experimented with flexible scheduling and had students watch the lessons in class, but due to the fact that many of our students don’t have internet access at home, we have yet to be able to fully implement it.

Chelsey Meyer and I decided we were just going to dive in and open up our library to students in the morning to come watch their lessons before school if they didn’t get a chance the night before and make it happen!  We worked on an Imagine Grant to allow us to buy some comfortable seating for the Library (Learning Commons) and started talking about how we would implement it (fingers crossed).

We talked to the students in her class about it and it became very apparent that our ideas of how they learn best might not match up to their own.  So we gave the students (in 4th and 5th grade) a homework survey in order to gauge their preferred method of homework and the time of day that would work best.  The results are below.

After looking at the results, we had a lot of questions. Who are the students that like homework?  What specifically do they like?  

Did they really like worksheets?  Or was it that they had’t had the experiences with other homework projects?

Almost 33% of students said they like their current homework, but only 24% liked doing it at home.  Due to our before and after school duties, it made sense for us to start by opening up the Library early in the morning to start and then re-evaluate after a period of time and look at putting some supports in place to allow us to open in the afternoons.We decided to open up the school in the morning to them, do a week of project based homework and a week of flipped lessons and give the survey again.  We also decided to start with 4th grade math and bring in 5th grade when we could gauge the number of students we would have in attendance.  We are sending home a letter to parents explaining the change and will start next week!