Relating Division and Multiplication.

Yesterday I was able to do a fun activity in my math class. I wanted students to relate what we had learned about arrays and multiplication to division. So we made some awesome mosaic patterns.  Students cut stripes of paper to equal pieces and then arranged their total pieces to create a mosaic. They used the same number of pieces in each row creating a mosaic array.  Since they had their total number of pieces already, students were able to practice division. The entire project went really well. I then had students write the fact family for their drawing.

Here is a tree mosaic.

A Rainbow

My example.  It is supposed to be a sunset.

 

Symbols of the United States

We have started our history and government unit in third grade.  I am excited, it is something different for our students.  I teach at a school that tries to tie instruction into environment sciences, so a history unit is always fun.  This year we are creating lapbooks to go along with the unit.  I have been having so much fun thinking of creative ways of displaying what we are learning. One of our first activities is learning about the Symbols of the USA and how the representing the ideals that our country was founded on.  We began by doing a little research on the symbols and creating them out of playdoh.  Students did this as rotations.

                                                         Mount Rushmore
Students then used their research and created sticks. I copied their information form for each onto cardstock.  These became sticks, with pictures of the symbol and placed in a pocket in their lapbooks.

 

This was really fun.  My students really enjoyed the rotations and making the stakes.  You can find that activity along with using the symbols to teach main idea at my TPT store.