Grade 3 Class Blog

Dear Parents and Families,

We are now heading into Week 9 of online learning and it’s hard to believe the academic year will be coming to a close in just a few weeks.

After School Activities

Our KIS (optional) After School Activities are continuing this week and we hope the students are enjoying an opportunity to socialise and connect with their peers from across the PYP. These take place at 2:30pm. The rooms will be closed for joining as from 2:35. Here is the link for these activities:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iWN0hrEjo8wnromC2hy5VvAdW2bebPHrZ1yOad9DpZY/edit?usp=sharing

Parent Zoom Meeting

Our weekly parent zoom meeting will be running at the usual time of 11am on Tuesday. Please feel free to join us for weekly updates and bring along any questions or feedback you may have.  The link for the meeting will be sent to you via email.

What’s happening in G3 this week?

In UOI this week, students will begin to experiment with different digital media tools and compare what can be achieved when doing something on a digital platform as opposed to offline.  They will be reflecting on, extending and enjoying creativity and building their appreciation of an aesthetic. Student’s will be exploring digital tools in Art, Music, Design and Gaming/Coding.

In language the students will view and discuss fictional animations to model the key story elements and consider an overall message or idea. They will comment upon and gain inspiration from best practice ‘Stop Motions’ and then start to plan out their own digital animation using a story board and directors notes.

This week in math we are continuing with our focus on data-handling. Students will be collecting, displaying and interpreting data from both bar charts and pie charts. They are continuing to develop mathematical language to support them in interpreting data and drawing conclusions.

Students will read independently or with an adult focusing on fluency, expression and comprehension skills. They will continue to participate in weekly library lessons with Ms Lindsay to develop specific reading skills such as inferencing,  summarising and making connections to the text.

We continue to be blown away by the creative and critical thinking skills our amazing Grade 3 student’s are showing each day. 

Thanks again for your ongoing support and partnership. We hope you all have a great week ahead.

G3 Team

Dear parents and families,

We hope you all had a great weekend and managed to find some time to relax and recharge.

Spirit Day

We have loved seeing the photos, videos and activities from the Spirit Day on Friday. The feedback has been wonderful and the student’s engagement with the different activities on offer made for a fantastic day of celebrations and school spirit.

Parent Zoom Meeting

We have had positive feedback from familes and have found the weekly coffee meetings a positive and informative time to connect and answer any questions. We will be running this at our usual time on Tuesday at 11am. Here is the link for tomorrow’s meeting: https://zoom.us/j/99421777140?pwd=T2xpQjgzMEZlcUtQOUJnL21YOGd2Zz09

If you require a password it remains the same: KIS (all capital letters)

After School Activities

Today is the first day our KIS After School Activities are on offer. To give our PYP community a boost towards the end of term we are adding some social ASA times
for the final four weeks. We hope the children will enjoy them and perhaps it gives
some parents and carers a short break too! These will all take part at 2:30. The rooms will be closed for joining as from 2:35. Please remind your children this is for KIS and they should not share the links with friends from other schools. This sharing causes us great difficulties when admitting children to the zoom classes. Here is the link for these activities:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iWN0hrEjo8wnromC2hy5VvAdW2bebPHrZ1yOad9DpZY/edit?usp=sharing

Learning for the week ahead

This week in UOI students will explore what the media is, how it has changed with the development of technology and what impact that has had upon communication with the intended audience. 

In numeracy this week we are tuning into Data Handling. The students have used some data handling skills throughout the year in different capacities but this week we will be beginning to delve deeper into some of the key features of graphs and interpreting information from data and various graphs.

In language students will be considering different endings to a short adventure story and focusing on how they can create suspense through the use of a cliffhanger. Later in the week students will be viewing and responding to key events/memories in a characters life and completing a storyboard to prepare for animation creation.

We are continuing to set daily challenges to support and motivate students with their reading and comprehension skills. Please continue to encourage your child to read independently or with someone at home everyday to build on their fluency and expression.

We are heading into Week 8 of online learning and couldn’t be more proud of our amazing students. The dedication and enthusiasm they have engaged in the programme with, despite the challenges has been incredible. Thank you again for making that possible and for you continued support at home.

Wishing you all a wonderful week ahead.

G3 Team

Good evening G3 parents and families, 

Hope you all had a restful weekend and have been able to get out and enjoy some fresh air.

Zoom Update

Just a reminder that Zoom has made some additional safety and security updates over the weekend. If you are prompted to add a password before joining any Zoom meetings (specialist, support and homeroom) please use KIS. We believe we have made all the changes required over the weekend but please bear with us if there are any small hiccups. We are trying to ensure the connections are clear. Please contact Ms Kirsten kirsten.du@kis.ac.th if there are any issues with specialist zoom links.

G3 Parent Zoom Meeting

Firstly, we would like to say another big thank you to all of you who were able to join us in the zoom meeting last Tuesday. It was great to connect with you and hear feedback for online learning from your perspective. We hope you found it helpful as a platform to ask questions and connect with the teachers along with each other. This will become a weekly scheduled zoom meeting with the next one held tomorrow, Tuesday 12th May at 11am. The link for this meeting can be found here: 

https://zoom.us/j/99421777140

Student Books and Resources

Today, the G3 team went into school to organise the student’s books and resources ready for you to collect from tomorrow. These are labelled with the students name and homeroom class and can be collected from the secondary school entrance. We have also included a copy of the STEM activities for Friday’s Spirit Day in each of these bags so please look out for these.

The Week Ahead

In UOI this week we are delving deeper into the key features of effective communication. The students have been working on creating a rubric so they can assess themselves and their peers based on four key areas. Students will be using a platform called ‘Flipgrid’ to record and then reflect on their communication skills and consider their next steps. 

We are continuing to broaden the students’ understanding of the decimal point and their place value skills through various activities in math this week. Our focus around multiplying and dividing by 10s, 100s and 1000s will allow them to strengthen these skills and in a range of contexts such as weight and length. We will be moving into word problems later in the week.

In language the students are developing their descriptive writing skills with a focus on characterization. Students will be building up characterization by portraying contrasting traits e.g. Hero vs Villain and using figurative language to describe a characters appearance and personality.

We are delighted to  have students participating in weekly library lessons with Ms Lindsay to develop reading skills as well as their daily reading tasks to support comprehension. This week students will be focusing on the recording of significant events and how these are documented through time. 

We are looking forward to connecting with many of you tomorrow at our parent zoom meeting, and wish you all a wonderful week ahead.

G3 Team

Welcome back after the long weekend!

Hope you have all enjoyed a restful long weekend with your families and we look forward to seeing you all back online tomorrow.

Thank you all for your support with another great week of learning last week. We particularly loved the students energy and KIS spirit in house colours on Thursday!

As many of you would’ve seen in the email sent out on Thursday, we are hosting a Grade 3 parent coffee meeting on Zoom tomorrow (Tuesday 5th May) at 11am. We hope this will be a chance for you to share your feedback on the online learning programme and ask G3 teachers any questions that you may have. We will also be talking through a few new developments and celebrate some of the wonderful work our students have been doing. 

You can access the coffee meeting by clicking on the link below and we hope to see you there: https://zoom.us/j/95209502541

We would also like to thank you all for your patience over the past week as we set-up specialist Zoom sessions. We understand there were some bumps for timings and access to the meetings. The schedule for these has been amended and collated into one document, which was sent to you via email and has been posted on the blog below this. Teachers will be sharing the new schedule with students and talking them through how to use the document tomorrow.

This week in our unit of inquiry students will reflect on digital media tools that they have used and think about the effectiveness of these as a means of communication. Students will also be beginning to think about the audience for communication and how that changes the way in which we communicate. 

In numeracy, students will draw on their learning of decimal numbers so far and apply it to solve real life problems. We will be using a range of contexts such as weight, money and time to allow them to make connections between decimals and these real life contexts.

For language this week, students will be looking at how they can describe characters’ feelings in different ways. We will be using a strategy called ‘Show don’t Tell’ to encourage them convey a character’s feelings and emotions by describing the actions & body language rather than explicitly stating the feeling to the reader.

We encourage students to continue reading for at least 20-30 minutes each day. Epic, Reading A-Z and their own personal books are all great options. We will be posting reading activities to support their comprehension and reading strategies on our ‘Must Do’ section of the daily slide.

We look forward to connecting with those of you who are able to make our Grade 3 parent zoom meeting in the morning and wish everyone a great week ahead.

G3 Team

Dear Parents and Families,

We hope you all had a lovely weekend and found some time to do something that made you smile.

We have started the week with a busy day of online learning and I cannot tell you how impressed we are with the quality of learning that is consistently happening from home.

As you may have noticed today, we are delighted to have specialist zoom sessions up and running this week. This provides our students with the opportunity to meet with their specialist teachers (live) once a week and connect with them and their peers.  Each homeroom teacher will have a timetable of these sessions posted onto their google classrooms for students to view. Please encourage them to note these times down and participate in these if they are able to. These subject days and times will remain the same each week for consistency.

This week we are tuning into our new unit ‘How We Express Ourselves’ and we started by unpacking our central idea today. The students will be exploring what effective communication looks like and sounds like, the uses and effects of digital media and how we can express ideas in creative ways. We as teachers certainly see our current circumstances as a unique lense to view this unit through and believe the students will be able to make strong connections to the tools and platforms we are relying on and the adjustments we have made during these times.

In math this week we are continuing to build on our understanding of decimals, and it was wonderful to see the students making connections to real life contexts and objects around the home today. Students will be looking at different ways in which decimal numbers can be represented and begin to order and compare decimal numbers. 

We are tuning into creativity and colour as ways to express ourselves in language this week. The students will be using an online thesaurus and word mat to think of word alternatives to convey moods and feelings, as well as word associations with different colours. Students will be creating similes to compare feelings to different nouns and developing these to create poems. We are looking forward to seeing what they come up with!

As this week is a short week (no lessons on Friday) we will be celebrating House Day on Thursday. Please encourage your child(ren) to dress-up in their house t-shirts and get into the KIS spirit for the day! 

Thank you again for your continued support and partnership.

Please don’t hesitate to contact your classroom teacher if you have any questions or we can support you in some way.

Kind regards

G3 Team

Dear Parents and families,

A warm welcome back for the new term. Despite the circumstances, we hope you all managed to spend some time with loved ones and enjoy each other’s company over the Songkran break.

We are excited to be back underway with our home learning today and the students have jumped straight back into their activities with enthusiasm and positivity.

We have started the term off by revisiting our learning routines and learners profiles as a way for students to reflect on what is working well and how they can make the most of learning opportunities this term.

As our sustainability unit comes to an end, we are looking forward to seeing students pulling their learning from across the unit into some creative posters focusing on ‘taking action’ later in the week.

This week our language tasks are exploring persuasion through advertising. We will focus on key features, comparing and contrasting current advertising slogans and then students will be applying their learning to create their own persuasive poster in connection with our sustainability unit and ‘World Earth Day’

We would like to encourage students to dress up in something green or blue on ‘World Earth Day’ (Wednesday 22nd of April) and we will enjoy celebrating together with connected activities throughout the day and week.

In math, we are going to be recapping our fractions learning then begin to make connections to decimals later in the week. IXL, Prodigy and Khan Academy are great platforms for students to practice applying their learning if they have completed their ‘Must Do’ task for the day.

You may have noticed that your child has Loom videos from each of the Grade 3 teachers today to explain the three different activities for the day. We are collaborating as a team to provide the best support possible to our students and hope that they will enjoy being more connected across the grade, just as us teachers are!

Please continue to encourage your children to find balance in their day, take regular breaks and be kind to themselves.

I would like to thank you all for your continued support as we know that online learning relies heavily on strong home-school partnerships. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or feedback about your child’s learning.

G3 Team

Dear Parents,

As requested, KIS teachers have compiled a selection of holiday activities to support families and the community over the Songkran break.

We have tried as far as possible to select activities which do not require a lot of screen time and can use what resources you have available at home, there are many for you to choose from.

These are all optional activities, there is no requirement to do any of them, just have fun.

We ask that you DO NOT post any of your holiday activities on See Saw or Google Classroom as this will have two effects for us:

• disrupt the flow of our learning platform for when we return

• create a huge amount of additional work for teachers who will have to clear posts when we return, time we would rather spend constructing high quality learning for your children

Please follow the links to find age appropriate resources and KIS Spirit Challenges.

This link will take you to the KIS Primary Library site where you will find three pages developed especially  for you to engage and enjoy:

1. An online resources page with online reading resources, read aloud sites and STEM resources

2. The Holiday activities page where you will find:

•  a slide show of play engagements for EY1 and EY2 by Ms Marie

• a slide show of fun activities and stimulations for EY3 – G2 by Miss Kirsten

• a booklet of choice activities for G3 – G5 themed around the profile of Risk taker (compiled and kindly shared by PYP teachers at Malvern College in Hong Kong)

• A selection of Physical Activity challenges from Mr Ben

• Stem and Reading Bingo from Ms Lindsay

• A selection of Musical Challenges and a singalong from Mr Chris

• A few IT challenges from Mr Eric

3. KIS Spirit Challenges

We hope that you and your family have a safe 2 week break and we look forward to viewing what has been shared through the KIS Spirit Challenges on our return to being a community together.

We can not thank you enough for all of your continued support through this really challenging time and we are so proud of everything our students have been doing.

Have fun and enjoy, Happy Songkran,

G3 Team

We have planned an exciting and interactive programme to maintain the continuity and progression in Learning, which continues with our curriculum coverage.

Each day, we will be logged-on between 9 and 10am to check-in with Students and go through the plan for the  day.

There will be 4 MUST DO lessons/activities posted on to your Child´s Google Classroom. Students will also have some extra choices from the CAN DO options. Instructions will be given where each task should be done eg for some tasks, your child may need to complete it on SeeSaw. We will be using platforms that the children are already familiar with from class.

We will be monitoring this carefully and give helpful feedback/encouragement, to see who has logged-on and submitted work – especially around 3pm

This is a great opportunity to develop our Children´s Self-Management and 21st Century Learning Skills.

Here are some tips:

• Make a plan for the day that will work for you and your family.

• Block off times for school work, leisure/snack breaks, exercise etc.
• Balance screen time (Some tasks can be completed on paper or practically in the kitchen). Students can then take a photo of their work and upload it onto seesaw or share it with us.

• Dedicate a place in your house that is most free of distractions that your child can complete their learning in.

• Be proactive!

• We welcome your feedback and are here to help. Please email us with any questions you may have, or any support you need.

• Stay connected

• We want to ensure everyone is feeling engaged and supported with one another in this learning community. Reach out, if we can help you in any way to make home learning more successful. You can check updates on the Home learning link on the right tool bar of this blog for updates.

Stay Cheerful and Safe 🙂

Thanks for all your support.

Recently we have observed some behaviours that have not followed our Grade 3 Essential Agreements and are disrupting Learning.

So we have now introduced a fairer and more consistent behaviour management approach that aligns with the KIS Quality Learning Behaviours and empowers learners to make positive choices, including thinking carefully about their language.