Explorers Unleashed: G3 Blog

Our second unit for this year is on  How We Organize Ourselves . Grade 3 and 4 are exploring the Central Idea that  p eople share their responsibilities in communities through offering goods and services in marketplaces . Our second and third lines of inquiry with this Transdisciplinary Theme are into how goods are produced and how goods and services are exchanged . We begun by asking the question "Where do our goods come from?" Grade 3 watched a Farm to Table video where we were introduced to Olivia - a shopkeeper with an empty store! As Olivia journeyed to the sources of her fruits, vegetables, milk products and meats we tried to solve the mystery of why the farmers had not delivered their products to Olivia and we learned about farm goods. After this we began to look at goods not sourced locally. Grade 3 learners brought in products from home and used a barcode tracking website to figure out where they were produced. This led to a discussion on imports and ...

Our second unit for this year is on  How We Organize Ourselves . Grade 3 and 4 are exploring the Central Idea that  p eople share their responsibilities in communities through offering goods and services in marketplaces . In our connected Language time we are reading David Walliams' Billionaire Boy. "Joe has a lot of reasons to be happy. About a billion of them, in fact. You see, Joe's rich. Really, really rich. Joe's got his own bowling alley, his own cinema, even his own butler who is also an orangutan. He's the wealthiest twelve-year-old in the land. Yes, Joe has absolutely everything he could possibly want. But there's just one thing he really needs: a friend!" In language we are inquiring into character. To begin, we noted traits of the characters we met in the Billionaire Boy onto Post-Its. We also read A little bit brave and Curious George visits a toy store  and noticed the traits of these characters. Then *shock* the Character chart w...

Our second unit for this year is on How We Organize Ourselves . Grade 3 and 4 are exploring the Central Idea that p eople share their responsibilities in communities through offering goods and services in marketplaces . Our first line of inquiry with this Transdisciplinary Theme is into h ow humans consume a variety of goods and services . For this unit we are going to be Entrepreneurs. We began by unpacking and sketchnoting this unit's Learner Profile attributes and asking "How can we be Principled / Communicators  as Entrepreneurs?" Then we jumped into an exploration of needs and wants. Each learner was provided with a shopping list and some finances by their parents. We took a trip to Toho supermarket where Grade 3 & 4 needed to use their applied mathematics to budget.  When we returned to school, we sorted all our items as either a want or a need. We are considering the Concept of Form - 'What is it like? How c...

In our morning Language Arts class, Grade 3 focused on the concept of Perspective and explored what it looks like to have an empathetic attitude. Empathy allows our learners to imagine themselves in another's situation in order to understand his/her reasoning and emotions. This helps us to develop as Open-Minded learners and reflect on the perspectives of others. We began by reading some stories and reflecting on how these characters must have felt: Learners then went through a writing process to develop their own fictional narratives. A highlight of the writing process for us is always conferencing . Learners conference with the teacher and with each other to develop ideas, correct spelling/grammar/punctuation errors and revise their work. When we all had our stories ready, we published a Grade 3 book! Some stories were typed up, some hand written. Some had colorful pictures, some had unique characters. We took our book to Mr. B...

As Grade 3 enters into their new Unit of Inquiry, we begun by accessing some concepts they were already familiar with: Roles and Responsibilities. Grade 3 were discussing the  ABC News Time podcast  from 12 October which referenced halloween and decided they would like to host a scary class party of their own. What better way to see the concepts of Roles and Responsibilities in action than to form a party planning committee? Before the break, learners defined their own roles based on the needs of the party and allocated responsibilities accordingly. Upon returning to school this Monday, the work began. There were decorations: and games: Grade 3 wanted to share the experience and had decided to invite Preschool to join us. We really enjoyed having them here! Now it's time to reflect on our party and consider how each role benefitted the community... *A special thanks to all the parts who helped out with snacks and dr...