The first three weeks of school have flown by really. In 3rd grade math, I wanted to review and assess, so I started with some Place Value lessons and activities. I was pleasantly surprised to see my peeps recalling a lot of math knowledge and exercising their noodles as well!

I decided to make one of those Place Value Strips I’ve seen all over Pinterest after trying to find one someone else had shared with no success. I printed each of our strips on different colors of paper, but if you didn’t have colored paper or you didn’t need multiple copies you could just have your students edge each strip with a different color marker. I made a little freebie you’re welcome to download to guide your students in making their own Place Value Strips, which show them how the numbers add up to millions.

You can see in the collage above that we chose different numbers 1-9 for the first number on each strip, and then we added the appropriate number of zeros to fill out the strip (e.g. 3 zeros on the thousands strip and so on). I used them in multiple ways with my students, asking them to pull out the ten thousands strip or the hundreds strip. I also asked them to tell me the value of each of their strips once they had filled them all out. Then we made a pocket for them to place them in their math journals for future reference!

You can {click here} if you’d like to download a copy of the Place Value Strips freebie I created. Please share it with your friends by directing them to this blog post! THANKS!!!

During week 2, I decided to continue working with Place Value. They definitely know how to say the big numbers, but I wanted to spend some more time on breaking them apart. We used their Place Value kits to work on adding and subtracting 4-digit numbers (just for some more review), then we wrote those numbers in expanded form talking about the value of each number. I wanted to reinforce to them why the addition of the numbers works, so I had them add together the expanded numbers. They thought this was actually really cool! Light bulbs were burning bright! 🙂

After working through several problems on the white board on the back of their Place Value kits, I gave them each four 5-digit numbers and instructed them to stamp out the value of each number within the bigger number. They love using stamps, and this was a great way to extend the learning and practice a lesson! We added those pages to their Math Journals as well for reference.

Last week, we began working in earnest on multiplication and we started by studying arrays more in-depth. I will post on this soon, but in the meantime here are some of the books we read as part of our math studies the last two weeks. We have some of them in our math library and others we borrowed from the library and still others are on their way to our house via abebooks.com, which is an on-line, used bookstore! I highly recommend it and these books as well!