Easy Spring Math and Art Activities for 3rd Grade

It is finally time to take all the snowmen down and put winter away until next year!  Spring is on its way and I wanted to put up some of my student's artwork, but I have been so behind in my curriculum this year (thanks pandemic) that I hated to take away time from lesson, so I combined math and art!  

Symmetry Butterflies

My math curriculum never once mentions symmetry!  Crazy!  So we did a quick lesson on symmetry by folding some paper to see if they had symmetry and talking about how we have parts of our body that is symmetrical (eyes, ears, arms).  Then we used white cardstock, watercolor paints and paintbrushes (you can see ours have been well loved), and a small cup of water to paint stripes on our cardstock.  We put a book on them and let them dry at the end of the day and finished our butterflies the next day.  

The next day we drew some shapes and decided how to divide them with symmetry.  Then we folded our painted paper in half and cut our butterflies.  (I did give them a quick cut out that they could trace.)  We added craft sticks for the body (I let them use markers to paint them) and used one pipe cleaner to make symmetrical antennae.  I also happened to have googly eyes to glue on (from Dollar Tree).  I did use my hot glue gun to glue the antennae and googly eyes, but liquid glue would work drying over night.  We hung ours from the ceiling, but they would also look fabulous on a bulletin board.

Comparing Fractions Rainbows

We have been working on fractions and I had introduced equivalent fractions and comparing fractions, but not a whole lot.  To practice it we colored these comparing fractions rainbows instead of doing a stinky workbook sheet!  I printed one out for myself and completed it under my document camera so they could see how it works and then I let them loose!

Differentiating

I also had a few students in my class that I needed to differentiate for.  One was not ready to work on fractions at all, so there was a blank rainbow that I could write in different math problems for him to compare and it worked out perfectly!  The blank rainbow and the comparing fractions rainbows can be found by click this link.