MEASUREMENT MISCHIEF

Today was a blast! We started the day with our usual morning meeting ritual, a little Jack Hartmann and a fun book. We read How Big is a Foot? by Rolf Myller. I like to keep my kiddos guessing, so after we talked about what it meant to use nonstandard measurement, I instructed them to each take off one shoe.  I guess they couldn’t decide if I was serious or not because they all just kinda looked back at me with a sneaky little grin. Once they realized it truly was ok, the party started….there were shoes flying everywhere and crazy socks revealed, (for those of us that were wearing socks)!

                    

They each traced one of their own feet.  We discussed the importance of lining up our measuring tool exactly with the item being measured, then got to work making comparisons.  It was fun for them to see just how many different feet we meet during the day! 

After the tracings were complete, it was off to desks to cut them out!  We worked on making comparison measurements today…simply,  longer or shorter and making sure our nonstandard unit and thingy being measured were lined up. 

As much as possible, I try to squeeze a little writing into math time. As the kiddos were sent off to measure objects of their choice, they were provided with two sentence stems.  The first was… {blank} is shorter than my foot.  The second was… {blank} is longer than my foot.  They had a blast and were all smiles from the beginning to end of this activity.  We had such a ball that we whipped out our linking cube “rulers” and continued to measure beyond a “foot”.

  

Math was marvelous and set the tone for the rest of the day. What did you do at school today?