Multiplication and Liam's Goats

The task:

Liam has 36 goats on his farm. He grew up hearing the all the fairy tales about the “big, bad Wolf” so he’s worried about a wolf attacking his goats at night. A fenced in pen area seems to be the best idea. He’s already growing corn on most of his farm and the grazing land is hilly, which only leaves a small area for the goat pens. You can see the space below that he has to build on:

Liam wants to find all the possible ways to break up the goats into equal areas. For each solution he wants there to be the same number of goats in each pen, otherwise the goats will get jealous. Record your solutions for Liam using words, pictures, and number sentences (hopefully multiplication).


Just a few of our ideas (we're still working):

Which Podcast do you want to watch?

On Thursday we went to the computer lab to create the titles for our nature trail Podcasts. We explored fonts, alignment, and resizing the text. After working as graphic designers to get the words looking exactly the way we wanted, we moved over the Art Studio to add color, borders, and sketches.

The New Mac Lab

Our old Dell computer lab was crowded with wires going every which way and big monitors. Sometimes kids would accidentally pull a wire and the computers would shut off. Now everything is organized. The new Macintosh laptops are white and the lab was setup right before Winter Break. Our first week back to school we met with Mr. Johnson and Ms. Harding to get an introduction to the computers and lab. We each have to log in using our lunch number. This is our password and username. We do not use accessory mice, instead we just use the touch pad on the computer. This is how you move around the screen and click. The whole lab looks and feels lighter now that the computers are white instead of black. The room seems bigger too - without all those big desktop Dell computers.

Creating a Pictograph

Last week the third graders created a large pictograph in the hallway. We learned that one of the most important parts of any pictograph is the KEY, which tells you how much each symbol is worth.

Organizing the Food

After school on Monday we had to organize all the food into boxes for families to pick up this week. We had help from the following third graders: Caleb, Connor, Jack, Adam, Parker, and Kelsey. Here are some pictures of the process of organizing 1,115 cans/boxes:

Graphing on the Computer

The last two weeks in the computer lab we have been learning to graph using this website:

http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createAgraph/

Here are some examples of our graphs:

Our Food Drive

The Third Grade Food Drive ended on Friday. Below you can see a graph of each group to see how many cans each class we were responsible for brought in.

Here is a chart we made of all the mathematical information the third grade gathered related to the Food Drive. We spent most of math today together trying to use efficient strategies to find the totals.

As you can see, the total cans/boxes the third grade collected was 1,115! The food was organized after school on Monday and will be distributed to families tomorrow.