Math Mammoth Grade 3 complete curriculum

Math Mammoth Grade 3 complete curriculum belongs to the Math Mammoth Lightblue Series. The third grade curriculum comprises two worktexts (A and B), an answer key, tests,and an easy access to script-made free calculation worksheets, which provide extra practice when needed.

The two books for Grade 3 focus on

• multiplication concept
• memorizing multiplication tables
• division concept and facts
• adding and subtracting 4-6 digit numbers
• using addition and subtraction to solve problems.

Also covered are time, money, measuring, and geometry topics, and introduction to fractions. Please see the table of contents for 3-A for a complete lesson list.

Some main features of the Lightblue Series books are:

• focuses on understanding of mathematical concepts
• uses clear explanations, lots of visual exercises and pattern exercises
• mastery oriented: concentrates fairly long on a topic, with fairly few topics per grade
• emphasizes mental math and developing number sense
• very little teacher preparation needed

AN ADDED BONUS! Buying this in Kagi store (as a download), you will also get Soft-Pak programs completely FREE. The 7 programs in Soft-Pak (4 math, 1 language arts, 2 testing) offer both on-screen and printable activities in a low-graphic, high content format. Read more and see screenshots.

Introduction

Third grade is a time for learning and mastering two (mostly new) operations: multiplication and division with single-digit numbers. The student also deepens his understanding of addition and subtraction, and uses those in many different contexts, such as with money, time, and measuring.

The first chapter in this book deals with addition and subtraction strategies. The student does a lot of mental math, learns addition and subtraction terminology, touches on algebraic problems in the lesson about addition/subtraction connection, practices borrowing, and more.

Then we tackle the multiplication concept in chapter 2. After that come multiplication tables in chapter 3, so multiplication does take a big part of book A. Then comes a chapter about reading the clock time (chapter 4) and a chapter about money (chapter 5).

In part B, we study place value with thousands (chapter 6), then measuring and geometry (chapters 7 and 8), followed by division in chapter 9. In chapter 10, we study a little about multiplying bigger numbers, and finally in chapter 11, it is time for some introductory fraction and decimal topics.

When you use these books as your only or main mathematics curriculum, they can be like a "framework", but you do have some liberty in organizing the study schedule. Chapter 1 should be studied before chapter 8 (place value). Multiplication chapters need to be studied before the division chapter, and all of those need to be studied before the chapter about all four operations (chapter 10). You can go through the chapters about clock, money, geometry, measuring, and fractions/decimals in some other order, if you desire.

This curriculum aims to concentrate on a few major topics at a time and study them in depth. It is for this reason that you will not see some topics that might be present in other third grade books, such as long division, or the standard way of multiplying vertically. I wanted the student to get a very good foundation in basic multiplication and basic division by single-digit numbers. I did not want to hurry through measuring topics, yet I didn't want to make a 500-600 page book either. There is plenty of time in grades 4, 5, and 6 to master division and multiplication with bigger numbers.

This is opposite to the continually spiraling step-by-step curricula in which each lesson typically is about a different topic from the previous or next lesson, and includes a lot of review problems from past topics. This does not mean that your child wouldn't need occasional review. However, when each major topic is presented in its own chapter, this gives you more freedom to plan the course of study and choose the review times yourself. In fact, I totally encourage you to plan your mathematics school year as a set of certain topics, instead of a certain book or certain pages from a book.

For review, you will get a worksheet maker page that you can use to make extra practice worksheets for computation or for number charts. You can also reprint already studied pages using the PDF file.

From a homeschooling parent who has used Grade 3 Complete Worktext with a third grader:

My daughter was in Saxon math but she was having difficulty learning new concepts and the teacher's book was just too much to sift through and I found it really didn't help much anyways. I switched to the Lightblue series grade 3 about a month ago and use it as our only math curriculum.

Please describe how you have liked the ebooks.
We really love it. I loved the helps on memorizing the multiplication table and within a couple of days my daughter had her 2's down. It is so nice to have the text with the workbook... my daughter really understands each concept as she does her problems. What used to take at least an hour to complete, she now does in 20 minutes. She recently completed her chapter 2 test and only missed one problem... but when I had her look at it again she realized what she did wrong... now that's what I call total comprehension! Thank you for created this series. I'm definitely going to order the grade 4 curriculum.

I wouldn't change a thing. Honestly. In my family we've done Lifepac, BJU, and Saxon and this is by far the best I've found.

Michelle Hall

See also a review of Math Mammoth Grade 3 complete curriculum by Carrie Kerr