Careers Unit

The third graders at Alsup Elementary will be starting a unit about careers in January. We have built a wiki page that includes a survey for people to share with us about their careers. The survey is very short!!! It asks two main questions: Why do you work? and What skills do you use in your work?

We are trying to get as many people to fill in information for our students. Please take a moment to answer these questions on our wiki!

The wiki survey will help our students learn about the variety of careers and connect with hopefully a global community.

Here is the survey: http://thirdgradeinquiry.wetpaint.com/page/A+Path+to+Follow


Thank you!

Student Created "Green" Community

Our last IB unit is entitled Give and Take and addresses the limited resources in our world. Students were challenged to build a section of a community on the edge of a river as their culminating project. This is loosely based on our own community, so they were also challenged to add a community center, an amusement park, a college, a football stadium, a wildlife preserve and a power plant. Their communities should reflect their knowledge of renewable and nonrenewable resources and how a community reduces pollution and waste. In addition to this project, students also completed an expository writing about ways that they think we could help our environment. Those writings are also posted on our class blog here. We also experimented with a "Wall Wisher" which is posted here. Double click to add a comment of your own. I like Wall Wisher because it is so simple to add ideas (no account needed) although it is easily cluttered. You can also add links and pictures very easily. I see this as a good virtual space for students to post questions at the end of a unit.

We collaborated on this project with Mrs. Heaton's fourth graders from Mossy Oaks Elementary in Beaufort, South Carolina. They mirrored this process in their class and posted on their class blog. We are going to spend some time looking at the issues that they feel are important in developing their community, and how those issues are the same and different from ours. Thanks to Mrs. Heaton's class! (take some time to explore Mrs. Heaton's blog if you want some great ideas. Hers is a great example of how to effectively use a blog to add to the learning in your classroom...)

Students did a great job, if some of their ideas are a little simplistic. If there were more than a handful of days left we would continue to discuss in class for months. This is certainly a discussion they will need to have throughout your lives, and that was a big part of the message I was trying to convey to them through this unit. Students would love to hear your comments.

Give and Take IB planner here.

Glogster Craze Hits Third Grade

My class has also started to use glogster! Thanks Liz for showing it to us at the Global Learners UNITE session. Today we used the Smart Board and Glogster to create a classroom glogster about our responsibility to share the world with other animals. Each student got to put an idea onto the glog. It was a fun and engaging way for students to collaborate on a project together and to incorporate ideas from a poster they created and a writing assignment they did independently for previous assignments. We kept it simple and just have photos and words on it.



crossposted at: http://mstaylorsthirdgradeclass.blogspot.com/

lesson plan: http://schoolweb.acsd14.k12.co.us/ectaylor/globallearnerlessonplans-IBUnitsofInquiry.htm