3rd Grade Math Club Problems
February 2013
1. Each honeybee has 5 eyes! Three honeybees are circling a flower. How many bee eyes are around
the flower? Five honeybees are returning to the hive with nectar. How many bee eyes are
returning to the hive? Now there is a total of 30 bee eyes in the flower garden. How many
honeybees are in the garden? What if there were 100 bee eyes? 1,000 bee eyes? Justify all of
your thinking.
2. Our original pumpkin bread recipe yields 3 loaves. If your group quadruples the recipe, how many
loaves will you bake? You decide to sell your pumpkin bread by the slice. Each loaf may be cut into
nine slices. If you slice every loaf that your group bakes, how many slices of pumpkin bread will
you have? If the entire class bakes 48 loaves, how many slices does the entire class have? The class
decides to work one more day and make 48 additional loaves. How many loaves will that be for
both days? How many slices? Justify all of your thinking with a model and number sentences.
3. To celebrate a holiday, called Oshogatsu, many Japanese grandparents will give their
grandchildren a red envelope filled with money. One U.S. dollar is equal to about 112 Japanese
yen. If the grandparents put 3 U.S. dollars in the envelope, how many yen would that equal? Using
the same exchange rate, if you had 5,000 yen, how many U.S. dollars would you have? Prove how
you know.
4. Buying things in large quantities not only helps the environment by reducing the amount of
packaging needed, it also saves you money. If you buy a single package of candy, it costs $1.25. If
you buy it in bulk, you get 20 packages in a box for $15.00. How much are you saving per pack? If
you needed exactly 30 packs, would it be less expensive to buy 2 boxes or to buy 1 box and 10
individual packages? Made a model or diagram to show all of your thinking.
5. The human body contains approximately 6 quarts (or 5.6 liters) of blood. As part of the circulatory
system, the average heart pumps about 1900 gallons of blood through it each day! How many
gallons is that in one week? One month? One year? Show all of your thinking.
How is your thinking the same as your partners? How is it different?
6. Careful, if you blink you might miss the beat of the hummingbird' wings! One type of hummingbird
is the North American ruby-throated rufous, which can beat its wings 53 times in 1 second. How
many times can it beat its wings in 1 minute? In 1 hour? Ruby-throated hummingbirds live to be
about 4 years old. If they spent half their life flying, about how many times would they beat their
wings? Show all of your thinking!
7. One afternoon you are planting flowers in your garden when you uncover a very rare coin-a Julius
Caesar silver denarius dating back to 47 BC! You quickly check the value of your treasure and
discover that a similar coin currently sells for about $600 on e-Bay! If the coin had an original
value of 2 cents, about how many times did it double in value until it reached today's asking price?
Create a model to show your thinking.