Jen+Kerr's+Page

​Lesson # 1

Math Investigations Grade Three Unit 3 Investigation 4.4 How Many Are Left?

You really need the Investigations curriculum to teach this lesson and have all of the pages make sense. But you may share with anyone who does teach it if they want to use it in future years.



In this lesson you are to use a lot of 100 grids to help the students do subtraction. I never taught the lesson without the smartboard, but could see putting 3 100 grids on the overhead at the same time and having space to write being a big problem. I was able to use notebook to set up the lesson so all the 100 grids were where they were needed. I also had plenty of space to write student explanations of their work. Students were able to come up to the board and show their work as well on the number lines that were already created within the document. This made the layout neater and easier to follow, as well as just a little bit faster.

Lesson # 2

Spelling/Word sort Grade 3 /ô/ sound

I have been using word sorts in my curriculum for a long time. I have also done them as large group to model for kids how to do a word sort. I have struggled at times with the best way to do a sort where the words were there and the children needed to create the headings. If I was to make an overhead with these pieces most likely by next year I would not know where all the pieces are for the sort. With the use of the smartboard the students were able to come to the board and move the words. They worked together to sort the words and find the category that each of the words went into. This I feel makes the students think about the words in a different way then when I just give them the categories and they must come up and put all of the words into the categories. The students were excited about using the smartboard and also more engaged in the lesson.



Lesson #3

Science Grade 3 Sound Unit Review

At the end of the sound unit we have a hads on evaluation where students create a project using the items that we have discussed during the unit. There is no paper-pencil assessment. However, I have wanted to create a way to informally evaluate the students understanding of the the vocabulary and concepts that we have been working on. I created a smartboard lesson that reviews these items.



We used this activity whole group to introduce it. I see in the future either in the lab or if we get more computers in the classroom that students could work on this activity in pairs. They would need some introduction to know how the matching game works but then could work with each other to review the vocabulary and context of the lesson. In the past I have not found a good way to review these items where it wasn't just a worksheet type activity. The students like the interactive use of the smartboard.

Lesson #4

Math Investiagations Unit 4 2.2 Which Terominoes Fit?

You really need the Investigations curriculum to teach this lesson and have all of the pages make sense. But you may share with anyone who does teach it if they want to use it in future years.



Often when we are working within our Investigations lessons we find that we are running out of space on the overhead for all of the pieces that the lesson calls for. In this lesson the students are to be using Tetrominoes (shapes created by 4 cubes) to cover an 8 x 10 rectange. There are a lot of tetrominoes in use in this lesson and the overhead and/or cart would get crowded with all of the pieces. I created both the shapes and the 8 x 10 grid in notebook. I was able to use the infinite cloner so that there were not a bunch of pieces all over the place jumbling up the work area. This made it so that the work area was neater for the students to follow along with the lesson.

In this less they also talk about turning and flipping of the tetrominoes. This is a great way to use the smartboard where they see you flipping or turning the pieces. You can also put them on top of each other to show how they are the same when you turn or flip them.

Also in covering the 8 x 10 grid the students are to count how many pieces they use. Color does not show when this activity is done on the overhead which makes it more difficult to count the number of pieces. When this activity is done using the smartboard you are able to have different color pieces to make it easier to count.