G3A Class News

We're Growing!

What an exciting ceremony this week! We are celebrating the fact that our school is growing fast and now we will begin adding to our facilities. Thanks to everyone who came out to support our school and for making our school a premier international school in Hanoi!

Reading

This week we learned about traditional literature. Traditional literature includes stories like fables, fairytales, folktales, myths and legends. Reading stories from countries around the world helps us to learn more about that country. When we read, we can look through different lenses (like putting on different glasses). We can read through nonfiction lenses to glean information about geography, clothing, transportation and language. We can also look through the lens of the narrative story and notice the life lessons which are clues to the values of that culture. Here are a few folktales we read this week:

Today we celebrated the end of this reading unit by creating our own posters of all the research tips we learned over the past few weeks. Here are a few examples:

Writing

This week the students started writing their own ORIGINAL fairy tales.

We learned that we can make our stories more interesting to our readers by following the MAGICAL FORMULA

We also learned how to add more details our stories by writing one telling sentence followed by a showing sentence.

The next step is to PUBLISH which we will do next week.

What can you do?

Ask your child to tell you all about their story.

Math

This week the students took a cumulative assessment of all that we have been learning since the beginning of the year. They will share their results with you next week. We launched Unit 7 which focuses on fractions. Have a look at the Unit 7 Family Letter below to see what we will be learning.

Social Studies

This week we wrapped up our study of "Cultures Around the World." Next week we begin a unit on being active global citizens called "Making a Difference in Our World." More to come on that later...

Here are some photos of the students sharing their country websites with each other and getting helpful feedback to improve their sites. As soon as they are all published we will share them here for you to enjoy.

Time to Celebrate Tet!

This week Co Oanh taught us all about Tet, which is the Lunar New Year. We learned about the difference between the typical calendar and lunar calendar. We also learned about some fun traditions during Tet.

Learning Through Reading: Countries Around the World

Learning to research is an important skill that begins in third grade. There are steps we can follow as we gather information and grow our own ideas about topics that we are interested in. Last week we chose a country to research. This week, we chose a second country and are trying to think about what is the same or different between our two countries.

Math

This week I read this article by Professor Jo Baoler from Stanford University. According to Professor Baoler, when students visualize mathematics their engagement and achievement increases. It is helpful for students to think of multiple ways to represent their thinking so that they can develop their number sense and flexibility. That is why you will notice that our math program emphasizes drawing pictures to represent our thinking.

Social Studies

This week, after a number of days of researching our countries, we began to plan for building our travel websites. We're creating websites to share the information we've learned about our chosen countries with other students in Vietnam.

Here are the focus questions we are using to guide this project:

• How is our life in Vietnam different from living in another country?
• How is the country of Vietnam different from another country?

Below are the tutorial videos we watched to start our Google Site.