If you’ve dipped your toes into Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, you already know the magic that happens when you get kids out of their seats, hand them dry-erase markers, and put them in visibly random groups at vertical non-permanent surfaces (VNPS).

The room hums. Erasers squeak. Kids lean over each other’s shoulders arguing about numbers instead of staring blankly at a worksheet waiting for you to tell them what to do next.

Third grade, though, is an interesting transitional year. Students come in with foundational counting and addition strategies, but they are suddenly into operations like multiplication, division, multi-step problem solving, and fraction concepts. If tasks are too rigid, students freeze up. If they are too abstract, they default to learned helplessness.

That’s where low-floor, high-ceiling tasks save the day. Every student can walk in and make sense of the starting point without feeling lost, but there’s enough room to stretch that your early finishers can explore patterns and generalize their thinking for 20 minutes straight.

Here are 5 rich thinking tasks tailored specifically for 3rd grade!

Design A Zoo: Area and Perimeter

In this task, your students will find the perimeter and area of animal enclosures at a new zoo! Each animal has a different-sized enclosure; some are missing sides, and some are not! There is built-in thin-slicing where students can move on to designing enclosures for other areas like the small mammal house, reptile house, and Arctic Circle!

Addition & Subtraction to 1000 2 Step Problems

In this task, your students will become treasure hunters! They need to figure out the fastest path to the treasure, then decide how much farther one path is compared to another! Add some extra fun by rolling up the included treasure map quest mood music to really bring the task to life.

Night at the Arcade: 2 Step Problem with All Four Operations

In this 2-step story problem task, the arcade-goers need to figure out how much they are spending and what prizes they can get with their arcade tickets. This task and thin slicing mixes multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction with a backdrop students can relate to.

Multiplication Facts 2, 5, 10 and a Bonus 2 Step Challenge

In this interconnected series, your students help the soccer team, the “Lightning Strikers,” get ready for the championship! Each step of the way, they complete a task and a series of thin slices working on a multiplication fact family of either 2, 5, or 10, and combine the knowledge they have been gaining to celebrate the championship. 

Fractions Thinking Tasks

Fractions can be so tricky for 3rd graders, and this series can support your students in grounding their efforts in a story instead of abstract ideas. In this series, your students have been tasked with helping plan a new community park! They will work on partitioning rectangles, unit and non-unit fractions, fractions on a number line, and comparing and equivalent fractions by partitioning garden beds, figuring out how much space they have left, planning nature paths, and paving their new paths.

Tips for Launching A Task

• Keep the launch quick, 5 minutes or less! Tell the story question and send them off!

• Keep Standing! There will definitely be students trying to sit, but don’t let them (aside from medical conditions, of course). We want to keep them thinking, and sitting in this context is a way for them to disengage from the task.

• Encourage students to learn from each other! Frame groups helping each other as different ways to look at the same problem vs. “cheating” or “copying.”

• Have students walk the room! Give them a chance to seeothers’s work, connect with different strategies, and listen to the way their peers see the problem. This is great for post-task notes!

You can get these tasks and tasks for every 3rd grade Common Core strand here!