Grade 3 EFL Class

My students and I had so much fun this week creating poems and riddles about our Earth and other planets. To activate the prior knowledge of my kids about riddles, we discussed what riddles are and watched some slides with riddles about planets. To build up the confidence of my ELLs and bring in an atmosphere of competition I shared some riddles of me ELLs from the previous year.

To scaffold the creative process I decided to complete a worksheet with 8 riddles that the students had to solve.

Girls solved the planet riddles very quickly.

After we checked the worksheet together with an answer key that I projected on the screen, I said it was time for my students to practice creating their own riddles. I prepared special space theme frames for the students to publish their riddles and that was an additional motivator.

Here are some of our acroctic poems about EARTH:

Earth is very 
Amazing, I always 
Remember Earth.
The earth is different.
Hey! Do you like Earth?!

by Moon Ju


Enormous Earth
Armed Earth
Risk-taking Earth
Threatened Earth
Hot Earth.

By BieBie

Earth story
Alive Earth
Rock and Roll
Tilted Earth
Hats for Earth

by Jennifer



Grade 3 In Class Support

This week in Miss Micelle's class I chose one of the understanding visible thinking routines - creating understanding maps to practice the reading comprehension skills of our Grade 3 students.

I chose two fables - one to model the strategy ("Belling the Cat") and another for students' guided practice ("The Boy Who Cried Wolf"). I also prepared my scaffold of the Ron Ritchhart's Understanding Map by changing the order of steps and putting all 8 steps into a grid.

At the beginning of the class we all read the "Belling the Cat" fable, and I asked the students to reflect on their process of thinking about the story and trying to understand it. We had a brief discussion and agreed that it always starts with a question in your head. While talking to our students I modeled going through the understanding process steps, sticking the cards with the steps on the board as a visual scaffold.

Next we went back to the fable and started by formulating a question about the lesson or moral of the story. Then we practiced making our understanding process visible while going through the 8 steps and talking about it. Gradually we came to the core of our question and managed to answer it. As a result we had at least 3 various lessons/morals of the story and every student could learn something that he or she connected to.

After that I gave my students the second fable and they formed four cooperative groups. Each group had an adult in it as there were two teachers and two TAs during this session. Both TAs, Miss Michelle and I guided the students during the discussion.
The students' goal was to read the fable and, using the Understanding Map, formulate the lesson/moral of the fable and write it in one sentence. During this activity all our students had to discuss their thinking and practiced using metalanguage.

All the students in Miss Michelle's classroom enjoyed this activity.