It is hard to believe that we have less than a month of school left! I came across this picture of our Target Board from back in the beginning of the year. Virginia has high expectations for its students in third grade. We have worked through a TON of math targets since the fall. 
Thankfully, we are at the point now where we have introduced all our standards and are working on reviewing them for fourth grade and making sure students can answer the rigorous questions that they will face on their end of the year SOL test. Third graders will be expected to work through questions that cover the six math strands of: number sense, computation and estimation, measurement, geometry, probability and patterns/function/algebra. Whew...that's a lot! Along with all that math thinking comes a lot of words.
We have the words on this math vocabulary vine. It starts out bare in the beginning of the year. Then as we teach new concepts and learn new words, we add them to the vine. By the end of the year it is completely filled. Hopefully these words are also filled in the minds of my students! To be sure, we use our final weeks of school to create math vocabulary rings. This allows us to take a final look at all these words plus they can take them home and review them prior to the third grade test and over the summer.
On one side of the card is the term and the other is the definition and visual representation or example. We fill it out together, then students just cut the cards across and fold in the middle. We add about 3 sheets of words each day for a week. They are super simple to make. The folded paper makes it thick enough so that the kids can turn the cards without the paper ripping. I like that making this set of cards now, after everything has been taught, allows us to review it all one final time.
Then the fun begins. We get to play card games. We play games like class pictionary or math baseball with them. The kids need some down time at this time of the year. Games like these let them have fun while still reviewing.
I've added these to my TPT store. You can click the link below to check them out.
Along with the cards and card games, we get down to the more serious business of answering tough third grade questions. It can be hard to find questions that are as rigorous as those on the SOL test, so I've used released items from the state to create some similar practice questions. These questions are arranged by strand. That way students practice being flexible thinkers. Their little brains need to bounce from strand to strand as they answer geometry questions to number sense to computation questions.
I like using this for classwork or homework practice. I make sure we go over the answers together and talk about what strategies we used to get the correct answer. If you need practice questions, you can also find these in my store. This set includes ten pages that I run back to back. This will give you five days of practice pages. Each day my students answer 12 questions - two questions from each strand.
You can check it out by clicking the link below.
I know it's a stressful time of year as we get our students prepared to take their first attempt at these types of tests.
Wishing my Virginia teacher friends all the BEST!
Questions/Comments? Email me at youngdor8@gmail.com or comment below.
youngdor8@gmail.com
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