Grade 3 Math Activities

Math is used for more than counting and calculating. It is also used for collecting, organizing, and analyzing information, and for making decisions. Help your child explore this exciting and powerful side of math. You might start this type of exploration by talking about the questions your child has that can be answered by collecting information. For example, how many people in your neighborhood are right-handed? How many people take the bus every day? How many children between the ages of five and ten like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches?

The activity here can help your child gather information as he becomes a food critic and judge. You might want to try it during a family or community picnic.

	At least three different brands (or samples) of the same food

	Paper and pencil

	Large paper and other materials for making charts and prizes (optional)

Have your child run a contest for the best of a particular food at a family potluck picnic.

First have your child come up with a food that he can use in the contest. He might use such things as different kinds of juices, peanut butter, or ice cream. The food could also be different people’s homemade pie, baked macaroni and cheese, or dumplings. As he figures out what foods and/or brands he wants people to taste, he should aim for three different choices.

Then your child needs to determine a scale for collecting people’s opinions. He could ask people to rate each item from 1 to 10, as in Olympic scoring, or simply ask people to choose from yucky, okay, or delicious (or other descriptive words that she thinks will work well). Your child also needs to figure out a system for recording the information and then displaying the results in a graph. If your child wants to announce the winner at the picnic, he should figure out how to display the results beforehand.

There are many different ways your child can display the data he collects. A line graph or bar graph for each type of response will show all the votes at once and will let people compare the results. A graph that organizes all the choices together in some way (such as a bar graph where each bar shows the total score for each food) can also make the winner clear. Of course, your child must first determine the criteria for a winner. Is the winner the item with the most top votes or are all the votes considered? Can a “yucky” vote count against an item? If people use numbers to rate an item, then the numbers can be summed and averaged to find the item with the highest average score. Or, the winner could be the item that gets the most scores of eight and above. A scale of yucky, okay, and delicious can be converted to numbers. For example, your child can use the following scale:

	Yucky = –1

	Okay = +1

	Delicious = +3

Your child can then turn all the votes for a food item into a single number by adding the values of each vote. The winner is the one with the highest number. Of course, the winner could also be the one with the most “Delicious” votes.

After the contest is over, ask your child to look at the data in different ways. What happens if you change the system (for example, convert the scale to different numbers, consider all versus only certain kinds of votes)? Does a different winner emerge? Do different ways of displaying the results paint a different picture? This activity will help your child learn how to use data to make informed decisions.

 Grade 3 Math Activities