West Park 3rd graders have been busy reading about the 5 different groups of vertebrates! The district’s new reading program, CKLA, has the students reading and learning about fun and exciting topics.
The teachers have really noticed an improvement in the engagement of our students with these topics.
A West Park 3rd grader shows off her tri-fold display on the red panda.
They just wrapped up a unit on ‘Animal Classification’. Along with reading many informational passages about animals, the students were also learning about text features like headings, photos, captions, maps, and diagrams. As for the writing portion of their ELA learning, the 3rd graders have been busy learning how to write strong, detailed paragraphs beginning with a topic sentence, followed by 3 details, and finishing with a concluding sentence.
As an ending project to the ‘Animal Classification’ unit, students were able to use their creativity in making a large tri-fold poster all about a chosen animal. They started by reading books about their chosen animals and doing research to learn facts about them.
A West Park student points to his display on the blue whale.
Then they included all the skills they had been learning into these large posters: a well written paragraph about their animal, a photo with a caption, a diagram, and much more. The students had a blast and enjoyed displaying their projects for parents and other classes to come in and see!