The materials for 3rd grade- Yazoo 3

The materials for 3rd grade- Yazoo 3

In my second post about the books and materials in general I'll describe weakness and strengths I noticed in the Yazoo series using the third part.

This is how the book looks from the inside. There is a comic at the beginning of first two lessons of each units. The comics always have four parts, the characters are regular, there is not much text. The recordings of the dialogs are very good quality, you can easily distinguish which character is talking at the moment. The comics goal is to introduce new grammar structure without naming it. The one on the picture is about negative present continuous form. This is first, enormous strength of this book. It is not a grammar translation way of teaching and learning. For third graders this would be the worst method I assume.

Next repetitive feature of the book is that first task is always about new vocabulary. There are six new words each time. Second advantage of the whole series are big pictures without names on them to every topic. They are identical but bigger version of the ones students see in their books. I find it highly important there is no confusion between the two. For sure some verbs are more difficult to be illustrated than nouns but I need to say that the authors did great job.

On the next page there is short description of the grammar structure which appeared in the comic given with model sentences. Under that you'll find one or two exercises, totally enough as students have more work in the workbook.

 

This is an example of the test from the book. Tests are always on one page, five teen points maximum, three tasks. No listening, only exercises like you se above. I attached this test as one of the worst I conducted so far. I believe students in third grade don't feel secure with reading and writing in their native language yet. That's why I find giving them tasks on a test to write words by themselves without any help pointless. Especially when the pronunciation of the words is different.

Every time I chem tests like this one it hurts me to give zero points because there were two letters missing or some were put in incorrect order. As a teacher I want to be fair and equitable towards students, their parents and my superior at the same time. Still, I fell bad when I knocked the student is familiar with the word, he or she just wrote it the way he or she can hear it. Nevertheless, sometimes I give one more coin for two or three almost perfect words. 

To sum up, I enjoy working with my students using this series. There are some drawbacks but much more advantages. The book is colorful and fun to use, which helps me to make learning English fun for my students.