Team Building in Grade 3

 One of the approaches to learning that we are focussing on throughout our first unit of the year is social skills. During our PE lessons, the goal of many games such as Cross the River, Tama Ire and Line Tag has been less on competition, and more on cooperation so we have been playing several games that require more cooperation than athletic skills. Encouragement from others helps motivate us much more than harmful words so we have also been working on positive communication during PE and within the classroom.

During unit time, students worked together with partners to learn more about some of the Earth's main biomes using research skills to help them discover specific information from both non-fiction books as well as from a couple internet sites (DK Findout and Britannica). In doing so, we examined the various features of non-fiction texts (Table of Contents, Index, Glossary, pictures, diagrams, words in bold, etc.) so that the students would be able to use and recognize those when searching for information in books.

Our first writing unit of the year also focuses on non-fiction writing as the students will be working on Information writing. Each of us is knowledgeable about a variety of subjects, so the students began by becoming teachers and informed others about a variety of topics from skateboarding and story writing to Minecraft and How to be a Spy! (I hope she's not writing from personal experience!)

In math, we have started our first unit by looking at how information and data can be represented in graphs and other visual representations.

Finally, the students have received their first HOMEWORK assignments of the year. It has been shared with them on Seesaw, and I have explained everything to them. However, if they need to be reminded, there are clear instructions on Seesaw, and I have even Voice Recorded the instructions for most of the Seesaw explanations. At this point, most assignments require access to either Seesaw or one of the following websites: Powerspelling.com, Prodigy.com or KidsA-Z. Your child should know how to log themselves into most, but to help those that forget, I will be sending out their login details to their school email accounts.

If anyone has any questions, please let me know!