In Lauren MacLean’s Kindergarten and Grade One class at Blair, the students have been investigating measuring. For this visit, I introduced the concept of baseline, as an important idea when we are comparing lengths or heights of objects.

The students lined up lengths of ribbons from shortest to longest and enjoyed investigating the matyroshka dolls and ordering them from shortest to tallest.

What we noticed beginning to happen, with just the invitation of leaving small clipboards available to the students, that many students chose to start recording their different measurements.

Some students already have a developed understanding of measuring using standard units, even including “cm” in their recordings and these students expertly used rulers to measure, paying attention to the baseline or zero marking. Other students used numbers to record relative lengths or heights or drew/traced other “units” (like paperclips) to indicate the length or height. One student used labels (small and big) to describe her measurements. We had the students share the different ways they used to communicate their measurements.

A short Animoto video of the students’ measuring investigations can be found HERE.

~Janice