I haven’t posted in a while because I have been so busy and I have had a lot going on! Halloween was last Thursday and it was a “charged” day in third grade to say the least! At our school, they students aren’t allowed to dress up, so that helps a little when it comes to keeping the kids calm. I love to bring pumpkins into the classroom and do a whole “pumpkin” themed day! I used this activity pack from my TpT store and it filled up our whole day!
We used the pumpkin observation sheet that I created and the students were able to use their senses to record their observations. This part they took very seriously. They had their clipboards and looked carefully at their groups pumpkin. Once they were done recording their observations, they estimated how many seed were in their pumpkin. They made several estimations throughout the process and they were able to adjust their estimation once the seeds were out of the pumpkin and once they saw what 50 seeds looked like. There were a lot of, “ooooooooooooooh’s” once they saw how little “50” seeds were. They realized quickly that 100 was a guess that was too low!
Once they made their final estimate, they took turns counting out all the pumpkin seeds and grouping them by 100s. When they started doing this, they were able to see that they could multiply by 100 and then add the remaining seed. That made for a happy third grade teacher since we had been talking about multiplication for over a month!
