8P29 Post 9

Watterson, Bill. "Measurement Homework." Retrieved from http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2014/03/how-to-make-your-kids-smarter/

           This week we are working on teaching measurement, which is usually a relatively brief, albeit important unit. Regardless of grade, measurement is a unit that allows students to be hands on with their learning, using actual measurement tools to record and analyze real world things. I am thankful in Canada we use the metric system rather than the imperial system that the Americans use because honestly, I think the metric system is much tidier and easier to memorize in terms of converting between different units e.g. centimetres to metres.

            In the textbook Making Math Meaningful, Small uses a standard formula for introducing different measurement concepts to students. There are three phases involved: definition/comparison, nonstandard units, and standard units. With definition/comparison, students simply identify what concept they would be measuring and then become able to recognize how different items can be bigger or smaller than others in terms of measurement. Using capacity as our exemplar, students will learn that capacity is the maximum amount something can contain. Showing them two differently sized buckets filled with sand, they should be able to see that these two objects probably have different capacities.

The next phase would be measuring with nonstandard units. Students use a little scoop to put the sand in the bucket, noting that it takes 10 scoops to fill the bucket. This stage seems like one that with most students you could move on from fairly quickly into standard units because if your students can understand the bucket’s capacity is 10 scoops, it shouldn’t be that much harder to make the jump that the bucket’s capacity is 500 mL. You can apply this strategy no matter what the unit of measurement is, although as I mentioned before, depending on the class, I don’t think it’s necessary to linger on phase one and two.

Measurement can be incorporated/combined with different subjects because many fields of study measure things in some way. For example, something we did in class today that was very fun was measuring distance of a standing long jump. Group members had to estimate how far they would jump and then prove their worth by making the leap. This is a very common measurement activity in physical education, as many times teachers have students record their process throughout the year, noting how many push ups or laps they can do at the start of the year and recording changes in progress periodically. As touched on earlier, students can have a lot of fun with these sorts of activities. It give students a welcome break from simply sitting and answering questions from the textbook, although there is a time and place for that as well.

I did my final learning activity presentation today. It was a hard one to make because I had to go with my Plan B option when I realized my Plan A idea really wouldn’t work that well with the unit. I had been reading some Lewis Carroll and came across a word problem I wanted to use. I thought students would find it interesting to do a math problem made by the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However, I realized that although the problem in question dealt with elapsed time and calculating distance, it really was more a question about rates than about measurement. Instead I made a word problem based on the show Adventure Time! I don’t think many people got the references, but then again, my audience was not a classroom of 8 and 9-year-olds (otherwise their enthusiasm and knowledge for the show would’ve been much higher). But I suppose that’s one of those inevitable things as a teacher. Sometimes you’ll want to do something and it won’t quite fit, so you have to use your Plan B (or C, D, etc.).