Explorers Unleashed: G3 Blog

For our final Visual Arts and Language Arts units of the year, Grade 3 have been exploring how personal/family histories, traditions and values are shared through stories. We explored narrative art like cave paintings, relief carving and pictographs. Learners also began preparing for a live storytelling event under the title "An event or moment where you learned something important about yourself". All stories are true (as remembered and confirmed by the storyteller), prepared in advance and told live in front of a small audience without notes: From Brandon: My First day learning to ski. From Aruto: Running towards you. From Aira: The Philippines. From Hiro: Mother's Day.

Our third unit for this year is on Where We Are In Place and Time . Our Approach to Learning this unit is through Research. Grade 3 learners have been exploring news sources  and learning about what goes into creating a great news report. We discussed a few ideas for stories we wanted to report on and then teams of reporters set to work conducting research. Learners wrote scripts for their reports and we put together this episode of DSKI News!

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...

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...