Third graders at Trevvett Elementary have been solving addition and subtraction word problems in Math (SOL3.3b) and studying habitats in Science (SOL3.6ab), so today students in Ms. L’Heureux’s class created their own habitat word problems with Google Drawings. First we reviewed several different habitats and the animals that live in them (desert, grasslands, rainforest, arctic, etc). Next we thought about what kind of number problems could happen in their ecosystem and whether they involved addition or subtraction: animals could have babies, animals could die, animals could migrate, etc. The students came up with some creative ideas! Then we went to Google Drive and opened Google Drawings (New > More > Google Drawings). We created a background by clicking the Shapes tool, selecting a square, and using the Paint Bucket tool to give it a solid or gradient fill color. To add the title, we clicked Insert > Word Art, typed the title, pressed Enter, and changed the font, fill and outline colors. Then the students used the built-in Google image search to find a picture of an animal in its habitat. Finally, they added a speech bubble from Shapes and typed their addition or subtraction word problem inside it. We shared the links to our drawings in Schoology so our classmates could solve them in the comments. You can try to solve some of them for yourself here. (UPDATE: I adapted this lesson using Google Slides instead of Google Drawings for other classes because we wanted to make the answer appear at the end. I added some of those examples to the document).
