Tuesday Morning Math Challenge

Today’s math challenge had a depth of knowledge level 3 (which ranges from 0 to 4)! With a depth of knowledge only 1 away from the hardest, their brains were definitely using critical thinking skills this morning!

 

Here’s the video of Austin and Jackson explaining their solutions that were 2 away and 329 on the nose! They even got closer to 329 than Mrs. Cross did! The closest Mrs. Cross could get by herself was 348!

Monday Math Challenge

This morning I gave my students this math challenge from Robert Kaplinksy. Here’s the problem:

We had 4 students who were able to solve it!! We found 2 different solutions, which is why we only have 2 videos.

Here’s how Jackson and Austin solved it:

Here’s Gavynn explaining how him and Sophie solved it!

I’m super impressed by their critical thinking so early on Monday morning!

STEM Olympics 2018 from San Antonio, TX

It’s no secret that we’ve been celebrating the 2018 winter Olympics here in our 3rd grade classroom! My students made bobsleds, snowboarders, hockey equipment, and curling stones. We tested each of them out and even awarded some medals for bobsled and snowboard races on the playground slides! Here are a ton of pictures and videos! We even coded our robot Dash to curl and hit the button on the curling house! Jackson made Dash a Lego Olympic torch too! It’s been fun learning about the Olympics and celebrating engineering week at the same time! #CrossCoders

 

Finding Area and Perimeter using Square Floor Tiles

I created a math activity where students used 12 inch by 1 inch strips that match the length of the edges of our 12 by 12 inch square tiles. Here are some of the challenges as well as multiple solutions for each task. That is one of my favorite things about math… we can solve problems in multiple ways and they can all be RIGHT!!!

  1. Create a polygon that has a perimeter of 8 units. What is the area?

Mia, Zander, M’Kale’s solution

2. Create a polygon that has a perimeter of 12 units. What is the area?

3. Create a polygon that has a perimeter that is twice as big as its area.

4. Create a polygon in the shape of a letter of the alphabet. What is the perimeter? What is the area?

5. Create 2 different polygons that have a perimeter of 16. Are their areas equal or not?

These 2 polygons ended up having the SAME area and perimeter!!!

Here is another set of pictures from a different group. These following two polygons had the same perimeter, but different areas!

 

Sound Energy Lab

Today our student teacher, Mr. Decker, led a science lab on sound energy! Here are some pictures and a video!

 

3D shape app smashes

Division Problems using PE Equipment

Today we borrowed PE equipment from Coach Guerra and used them to act out division problems! Here are our Seesaw projects from the activity. We loved using the frogs and hula hoops! Thanks Coach Guerra!!

Pixel Art using Google Sheets

A couple weeks ago we used Google Sheets to make input/output tables. This week we are using the spread sheet application to make pixel art! Here are some of our creations! Super big thanks to Eric Curts for creating the template!

Hour of Code

Last week was Hour of Code week! Here is the Thinglink that emcompasses all of the coding we did last week! Move your mouse over the red dots to see pictures and videos! Austin and Jackson coded the background image using Scratch and Scratch Jr!

 

Here’s the video of the Google Doodle that Jackson and Austin made:

Do you want to build a snowman?

Check out our Google Slides snowmen!