3rd Grade Ancient Greece Math

Third graders in Ms. Leo’s class at Varina Elementary have just started learning about ancient Greece (SOL3.4) so I wanted to take them on a tour of Greece using Google Earth. I created a .kmz file with placemarks on important sites like Olympia, where the first Olympics were held (you can still see the track they ran on), the Parthenon (if you turn on 3-D Buildings you will see it), and Mount Olympus (the highest mountain in Greece where they believed the gods lived). But since my focus this year is on math and writing, I had them to measure the distances between the sites using the ruler tool and write some word problems about those distances. I created a Numbers spreadsheet with a lot of the information pre-loaded, that you can download by clicking here. First the students entered the distances into the spreadsheet. Then they came up with questions about the distances. We talked about clue words for addition (“all together” or “in all”) and subtraction (“how much further” or “how many more”). They made up word problems about Greek characters traveling to the different places and gave reasons why they would visit each place (in order to review what was there). Next they rounded the numbers and got an estimate. Finally they solved each other’s problems, and I had a formula that would check if they were correct when they clicked the red “Check” box.