Mindful Monday - grand conversations, metacognitive goals and vocabulary

Almost at the end of November, we can hardly believe it.  Look at all the outstanding learning we have done so far this year.  I'm so proud of all of you metacognites!  meta = big, cognites = those brilliant thinkers who believe in sparking their neurons every minute of the day.

This morning we started our grand conversations with our exciting novels.  This is a wonderful opportunity for us to get together with our friends in the other grade 3 classes to expand our reading comprehension and community building skills.  Grand conversations are "student led conversations about a story where students ask the questions, discuss their thoughts and feelings, and make meaning as they talk about the story." 

Class norms for group discussion ...
• Make sure only one person talks at a time.
• Give others a chance to share their ideas.
• If you don’t agree ... say so, but be polite!
• Listen carefully! What is the speaker really saying? Has the speaker finished speaking? (Sipe, 2006, p.290)

Here are some photos to share:

We are always building our vocabulary in Room 123, and today we revisited three social studies words that came out of the global picture books we read last week about young people who are making a difference in the world through their actions.  Global = world.   The words we recycled today were:

poverty = the poorest of the poor in any country (no food, no shelter, no job, no running water or electricity).  Did you know that the United Nations has made a commitment to end extreme poverty in world by the year 2030?  Check out this website to learn more about the global goals:  http://www.globalgoals.org/#the-goals

quality of life = the standard of health, comfort, and happiness experienced by an individual or group.

"the things that are needed for a good quality of life"

We have learned that many different people have different qualities of life than us.  Quality of life is part of your identity.  

global citizen = a person who wants to make the world a better place, they recognize world problems and they act to protect people and animals who are being unfairly treated.  We have been studying some inspiring global citizens like:  Boyan Slat, Malala, Jane Goodall,  David Suzuki, WWF, The Green Belt Movement, all of us in Room 123.  Here is a link to a video about global citizens:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yio6kQrlYQ

Speaking of global goals, we worked on some local goals for ourselves this afternoon.  We are very interested in improving our learning one way to do this is to set SMART learning and behaviour/value goals to push our thinking.  Here is the criteria that we brainstormed today for what makes a good goal:

Goals

What are they? 

Something you need to get better at.  “practice makes progress”

Something you need to work on.

Something that is possible to achieve, not impossible. 

You have to be able to achieve it. 

It should be mindful, you have to think about it and it has to make sense. 

It should be a caring goal. 

Goals make you more responsible for your actions. 

You must explain how you will achieve your goal.  Tell me your strategies for achieving your goal.