As you may have read last time, the class wanted to give the parents a tour of the class to tell you all about the fun things we have going on in Grade 3.Today, we wanted to show you one of our Language Arts boards, which includes the Home Reading Program board, the Calendar board and the computers.

The Calendar board allows us to highlight important dates and show the students how quickly we are moving through the days. While we don’t highlight it everyday, it is still useful for showing students how far away certain events are and remind students of the calendar skills they learned in the previous years. One of the important areas on the board is the “Goals for the Week”. We just started doing this this week and is an important way for students to think about behaviour and the expectations of the class so that we can all work together as a team. These are tough goals this year and we have been working very hard on them. The students come up with the goals themselves. At the end of the week, during class meetings, we will go over the goals and discuss how they went and whether we achieved our goals.

Setting goals is an important skill for children. We will be setting many goals for a variety of things this year, particularly in our Home Reading.

Speaking of which, our next board is for our Home Reading program. Every students has a space that corresponds to an online website called Pockettales. Pockettales allows students to find and share books with their friends. As students read books, they add them into the system. As students read books, they get badges to show their achievements. When they finish their books they can also share them with their friends in the class. We used Pockettales for the first time last year and the students had a lot of fun with it. It is still fairly new, so the Pockettales team is still adding features and working out the kinks. This will be one part of our program which will be starting in October.

As you can see, we also have a computer in the class! I have scrounged up some computers including my old computer, an old computer from the computer lab and the old laptop belonging to my wife. I am still working on getting everything up and running so the students have not had much chance to use it yet. Once they are up and running we will have a number of online and offline resources we will be using on them. It is very exciting to have lots of great opportunities for using technology in the class. Also, if anyone has a 75w power cord with interchangeable ends on it for a laptop, would you please let me know? We seem to have lost the one for the old laptop and I need something that will power it. Thanks!

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow, we will have some exciting news about our Science program! Stay tuned. Here is a bit of a hint of what we are learning about.