Array City

It's Christmas time in Array City!  The students made these lovely winter city scenes in art and we added some math content by making and labeling arrays with the window patterns.

 

After students made their arrays, it was time to label with math content.  The third graders had to write the fact family for the array represented.  We even got into a math discussion about perfect squares and square roots.

Multiply It!

These third graders have been working hard at building a foundation for multiplication and developing strategies for multiplication.  This is one of our most critical standards for third grade.  We will continue to work hard on both multiplication and division in the New Year.


At school, we started with word problems with both multiplication and division situations.  We have drawn out multiplication with circles and stars.  We built arrays and even did an array hunt around the classroom.  One of my favorite activities has been building a multiplication chart out of arrays.






If you follow us closely on SeeSaw, you will notice so many posts deal with mulitiplication.  Another strategy we have been hitting hard is skip counting.  This would be great to practice at home, in the car, any old time!  It will really help with multiplication fluency.  At school, the students have enjoyed the skip counting mazes.  I did put them in your child's backpack to continue over the break.

We will continue to work hard all of January to fluently multiply and divide.  We will be practicing with apps, card games, one minute timers, the computer, dice, and even fidget spinners! Memorizing math facts is an important foundational piece to future math success.  As with any memorization piece, it won't stick without continued maintenance.   We will continue to practice at school but at home practice is essential to sustain fluency.  There are some fabulous apps for quick practice.  Check out Quick Math, Math Bingo, and Math Cards by clicking on the app names.  You may remember these apps from when we were working on addition and subtraction fact fluency.  These apps grow with you.  Also, if you have a computer at home with Flash, here are some fun interactive games to play.  Click on the links.

Meteor Multiplication

Fruit Splat Multiplication

Bleepy's Gifts Multiplication

Croc Doc Division

Demolition Division

50th Day Mystery

The 50th Day of school started out in style.  The students and teachers looked like cool cats!  The room looked like a diner and the music was rock'in!  We even danced the hand jive!

Then, our fifty's day took a mysterious turn.  Mrs. Hornby came in with a mystery.  Someone had stolen another boy's microphone.  She had six suspects and a description of each.  We had to be her detectives to solve this 50th day mystery. 

We solved reading and math puzzles to get clues.  Then, we used the clues with the descriptions to help us solve the mystery.  Students had to read passages and infer, solve math word problems, practice rounding, and balance equations.  It is a good thing Mrs. Hornby asked these third graders to solve this mystery because they have the skills!

We did it!  These super sleuths cracked the case and delivered their findings to Mrs. Hornby.  She gave the sleuths a "50 days Smarter" award and some bubble gum.  We also celebrated with root beer floats and more hand jive!

Van Gogh's Sunflowers

What do you get when Mrs. Jensen is the guest teacher?  A beautiful art lesson and a wonderful story  about Vincent Van Gogh.  Mrs. Jensen shared a great book called Camille's Sunflowers.  The book describes Vincent Van Gogh's time in a French village where he becomes friends with a family that lives next door to him.  It was during this period of his life that Van Gogh painted his famous sunflowers.  We used the text to analyze narratives.  After reading, we not only sequenced the plot events, we also sorted the events by important and less important.

Then, the students' favorite part!  They drew and painted their own sunflowers.  The students used oil pastels and a watercolor wash to create these amazing works of art.

Halloween Zombie Breakout

We arrived at school full of Halloween excitement!  Some of our wonderful parents made delicious treat packs for each of the students.  However, somehow the zombies got to them and locked them all up!  The students had to work in groups to solve a series of clues.  The clues had the students practicing our math standards like rounding and multi-digit addition and subtraction with regrouping.  When the students solved a clue, they got one of the combinations for the lock box.

The students worked hard to unlock their treats!  It took a lot of team work and trial and error.....and time!  Students worked hard all day to solve this breakout!  These third graders' perseverance was no match for the candy stealing zombies.

Kindergarten Buddies

This year, we are pairing up with Ms. Cousin's class to be buddy classrooms.  We will do all sorts of learning activities with our kinder friends.  For our first activity together, we designed a pumpkin patch marble maze.  The third graders really enjoyed being the older students in buddy scenario for this first S.T.E.M. activity (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).