We've had a busy start to the
term measuring all sorts of things.
We read the story of Jack and the Beanstalk and used Giant feet to
measure how many Giant
feet tall the beanstalk was. The challenge was that they only had 5 Giant feet.
Those who were able to figure it out then got to go outside and measure how many Giant feet away other things are. This group is measuring how many Giant feet away the water fountain is from Room 16.
We went outside to find something that was the same length as the metre stick. Only one of us found something!
The children explored around
the classroom looking for things that were bigger and smaller than the ruler.
They drew pictures of the things that they found.
This activity was a real challenge! The children had to put themselves in order from shortest to tallest without talking.
They also measured how many clips tall and
wide their dragon was. They were given clips of different size and string to use
while measuring. Afterwards we talked about why it would be a good idea to use the same size
clips to measure and whether we should be including the curl of the tail in our
calculations. We also talked about how we could use the string to help us
measure.
Yesterday the children were given scissors,
a stapler and a piece of A3 paper. The only instruction they were given was to
"make the longest paper chain". They were divided into groups of 2 or
3 and had to share a stapler between 2 groups. It was interesting to listen to
them plan how they were going to do it and watch how they went about creating
their chains.
Today we compared the lengths of the
chains. We talked about why some of the paper chains were longer than
others and came to the conclusion that the groups that cut longer, thinner
strips were able to make longer chains. We also discussed what it was like
working in groups and how hard it was sometimes to have to share the stapler
with another group.