3rd Grade Geometry Unit Practice

After the positive reception from my students about our Uno’s Garden review activity for estimation and multiplication, I decided to create a similar activity to practice the skills from our geometry unit.

You can see our district power standards here. I’ve modeled the activity directly from the state standards, though, because there are a few holes. Also, looking to the future, here are the geometry Common Core standards. I linked each of the problems to Barbara Kerley’s great biography, What to do About Alice?

We’d been reading So You Want to be President, and I remembered this image from Kerley’s book:

The couch! We could find the perimeter of the couch! So I developed a set of six questions related to the book, posted them around the room, and had students move from question to question at their own pace. Because we’re a 2nd/3rd grade class, there are questions at a variety of difficulty and depth of knowledge to permit everyone some successes.

You can see the questions and my answer booklet below (I always print it on special paper because students have told me it makes the activity feel more like a quest or a scavenger hunt rather than just skills practice).

WATdoALICE

Please let me know if you found this lesson useful! I’ve found it to be a much better alternative to a straight-up assessment.

Lines, Line Segments, and Rays

Today’s our last day before Spring Break, and we’re taking our Unit 6 assessment on geometry so we don’t have to worry about it after break. Here’s one of the songs we came up with for remembering the difference between lines, line segments, and rays:

Lines, Line Segments, and Rays
To the tune of “Silent Night”

A line is straight
Goes on forever
Add two points
Still a line? Never!
Now it’s a line seggggment
One point is a ray

Lines, line segments, and rayyyyyyys!
Lines, line segments, and rays!

We have gestures that go along with the dance too. One of these days I’m going to figure out how to get a halfway decent audio or video recording, and rest assured that as soon as I do I will post it promptly!

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Polygon Song

I can’t claim to have come up with this delightful tune, which my students use to help remember the different types of polygons. I do need to create one for the different types of quadrilaterals, which always seems to be a problem spot for kids 2nd grade on up.

When we sing our version of this song, we usually go up a half-step in pitch at each new verse, just to change things up.Wait, There’s More Sides!
To the Tune of “Alice the Camel”

Polygons with three sides, triangle
Polygons with four sides, quadrilateral
Polygons with five sides, pentagon
But wait! There’s more sides!

Polygons with six sides, hexagon
Polygons with seven sides, heptagon
Polygons with eight sides, octagon
But wait! There’s more sides!

Polygons with nine sides, nonagon
Polygons with ten sides, decagon
Polygons with two sides, just an angle
And now we are done!

We also love reading Marilyn Burns’ The Greedy Triangle during this unit.

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