Third graders at Holladay have been studying animal migration (SOL3.4) and they have also been studying place value. Since animals usually migrate long distances (numbers in the hundreds or thousands), I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to review both concepts at the same time. First the students picked an animal that migrates and did some online research to find out how far it travels. Next we went to CheckThis and created a website about our animal. Students included the number of miles their animal traveled and added a picture of their animal. Then they added a poll question to ask visitors to identify the digit with a certain place value (i.e. “in the hundreds place”). I posted all the student sites to one page so they could visit each others’ sites and answer their questions. You can see them here: Ms. Moon’s class and Ms. Cowart’s class. One way to extend this activity would be to add a GoogleMap showing the path that the animal travels. We only had an hour though, so we didn’t have time to do that, but I was impressed with how much they accomplished in such a short time!
