Teaching Time and having a little fun

It has bee such a long time since I have blogged. I wish I could say I have a good excuse, but other than being completely overwhelmed with my personal and professional life, I have nothing.

So back to it!

We have been working on multiplication and division and have had some fabulous lessons that I will share with you in the coming weeks. We have moved on this week to time. For most third graders telling time is quite simple but with the disappearance of Analog clocks I want to make sure they have a solid understanding. I don’t want them to end up like my sister (Senior in High School) who can’t read an Analog clock because according to her “there are only digital clocks in all the classrooms and I have my cell phone the rest of the time”.

I was sick yesterday so Nilde (my teaching partner) did a review of the clock with them and gave them some homework to practice. I was looking for something a little fun to do, because looking at clock after clock on a worksheet can get a bit boring, when I stumbled upon this cute idea on pinterest. I believe this activity was for a much younger class but I adjusted it to work for my kids and they had a great time.

In English we are working on writing a set of instructions. I referenced the instructions lesson and wrote a set for the kids to follow for the activity.

Here is what we did:

I gave each student one clock face, one strip of brown construction paper and one list of class names. 

Then I gave them the following instructions:

Part 1

1. Cut out the clock face

2. Draw a specific time on the clock face with hour and minute hand

3. Glue the clock face to the brown srtip of paper

4. Come see Ms. Pam with your clock

Part 2

5. Glue the class names into your Maths Journal on the left side of the next blank page

6. Now have fun and ask each member of class "What time is it?" Once they show you their watch write down the time next to their names in the Journal.

The whole class enjoyed the activity and it gave me a great opportunity to see who really can tell time and further more, who can draw the hands on the clock accurately. 

Because we are learning about am/pm and military time I then asked each student to write the time as if it was afternoon. This proved to be a bit more challenging for some but was good practice.  When reflecting on the lesson several kids realized that they hadn't asked the person if it was am or pm and that they needed that information to write the correct time. 

Place Value

How do you teach place value?

 Do you give it much thought or is it just part of your textbook curriculum?  I ask because until this year I really didn’t give it much thought either.

Like many I spent part of my summer reading Guided Math  by Laney Sammons and have set some goals (hopefully attainable) for myself this academic year.  One of these goals was to use Math Journals with more forethought and execution. With this goal in mind I took the whole first week of instruction and focused on place value and a review of base 10 with my kids.

We did some hands on work with manipulative, some group work and partner work and some great activities with my favorite place value tool…the Arrow Cards.

 For our Math Journals we worked together with sets of base 10 problems. We cut them out, glued them in and answered our investigation questions using them. It was a great review for all of 3rd grade.

 Next I split the class into small groups and gave them each a mixed set of arrow cards. I made sure not to give them the same exact set.  I asked them to find the largest and smallest value they could find. 

 We then had each group present their largest and smallest number to the rest of the class.  The kids really enjoyed this activity and helped them to understand the vocabulary that we were using as well.

Because Arrow Cards are not readily available for all my kids I created my own set and two fun activities to go with them. 

You can find them here: Arrow Cards & Activities

Let me know how you teach place value. We are off to estimation and rounding and I'll be sharing my lessons next week. =)

Happy Teaching!!