Parent & Child Activities
On this page you will find three different activities that you can do with your child at home. These activities target both math and literacy skills and will provide a fun way for your child to gain some very painless practice. If you give these activities a chance, you will certainly see how possible it is for learning and fun to go hand in hand. These activities will focus specifically on the mathematical strand of measurement that aligns with the 3rd grade Common Core Standards.
Have a Reading Challenge
Your child will have a better chance at loving to read if they can see that you love to read too. You can have a reading contest between you and your child or amongst the entire family that goes on continually. Create a chart with every participant's name on it and display it somewhere prominently in your home. You can either make the contest go by the number of books read or by the number of minutes read. Often times, it is preferred to use the number of minutes read because it levels the playing field. This avoids your child reading tens of picture books while you struggle to get through one extensive chapter book. You can select a winner at the end of each week or each month and a designated prize may be given. The "loser" should not be punished, as the idea is to encourage reading. The reading chart can look something similar to what is displayed on the right.
By participating in a reading challenge, your child will be on track towards reaching several of the Common Core literacy standards, such as: By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poetry, at the high end of the grades 2–3 text complexity band independently and proficiently. |
A fun way to link a book challenge to measurement is to have each participant have their own set of shelves where they keep their read and unread books. Participants should be able to earn extra points in the challenge by keeping an accurate measure of the books on both shelves in the customary and metric system and decipher the rate at which each shelf either grows or shortens. This idea directly relates to the Common Core math standard that states: Solve problems involving measurement and estimation of intervals of time.
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CLOZE Procedure
If your child is struggling with comprehension or you may just be looking for some silly fun, then you want to try the CLOZE procedure. The CLOZE procedure is something that is very similar to Mad Libs, which I have displayed on the left. CLOZE is an activity where you take a piece of text and take out every Nth word and leave it blank. It will be the student's job to then go through the piece and use semantic (meaning) and syntactic (word order) clues to fill in the blanks. This activity is directly supported by the Common Core literacy standard RI.3.10, which states that: By the end of the year, read and comprehend informational texts, including history/social studies, science, and technical texts, at the high end of the grades 2–3 text complexity band independently and proficiently.
Be sure to also visit the Mad Libs website, where you and your child can have some fun practicing this procedure, but with an emphasis on parts of speech. Click the button below to visit the site. |
CLOZE can easily support mathematics comprehension as well. CLOZE has been determined to be effective by using content-area texts just as well as literary texts. By taking a passage from a math textbook, you can delete every Nth word and ask your child to follow the CLOZE procedure. This should help your child to brush up on comprehending concepts that they may be struggling with. The idea of using this procedure for math would be supported by any content area of math under the Common Core math standards, because it focuses on strengthening the students understanding of the subject.
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Hold an Estimation Scavenger Hunt
Being able to estimate a particular measurement is an important skill that we focus on in third grade and is directly supported by the following Common Core math standard: Solve problems involving measurement and estimation of intervals of time, liquid volumes, and masses of objects. The way that you can host an estimation scavenger hunt is by simply giving each player a list of measurements that they need to find in the house without using any measuring tools. Once every player has chosen what they believe to be their best guess, you can use measuring tools to see who was the closest.
It may help your child if you review with them ways of arriving at a measurement without the aid of measuring instruments. The first strategy is to use a referent, which means that if you are looking for something that is 6 feet tall and you know that you are 5' 10", then you look for something that is about 2 inches taller than you. The second strategy is called chunking, where you break the parts into subparts and estimate each part. The third strategy is called unitizing, which is where you may be looking at the kitchen floor and realize that each tile is about 12 inches. If there are 10 tiles that go across the floor, then you know the length must be approximately 120 inches. |
Above is an image that shows an example of what the estimation scavenger hunt may look like. Now, I will explain how you can easily incorporate literacy into this fun math-filled adventure. Each player must justify his or her answer in writing. This justification will show that they either used a referent, chunking, or unitizing. This will definitely cause the activity to take more time, but it will provide excellent practice for your child in their ability to make sense of measurements and will also allow them to further develop their explanatory writing skills as they do their best to explain why their particular answer is the right one. This is supported by the Common Core literacy standard W.3.2, which states: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.
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