Week 9 Reflection- Measurement

   This week the class focused on the strand of measurement. We determined that “measurement is the assignment of a number to a characteristic of an object or event, which can be compared with other objects or events” along with the use of units of measurements.  To begin class, we started off with the weekly activities led by our associate teacher candidates. This week I was in Alessandro’s group. The material in which we covered was geared towards a grade 4 class. To start off, he asked us to organize ourselves in a line from tallest to shortest. In order to complete this task we as a group had to communicate and problem solve together to get in the right order. To further this task and take it to the next grade level, we could figure out the mean, median and mode of our heights based off of the order we put ourselves in. Next, a length of string was presented and we were to guess which of the group members the length was closest to. At first we thought it was Daniel, but when we put the string up next to him it fell a bit short. Using this information and our line order, the next person it could resemble was myself. We compared the length of string to my height and it was a match! Another tool of measurement we used was estimating how many water bottles tall we were and then comparing our estimations to the actual amount. Stefan went first since he is the tallest and the rest of us made our guesses based off of his. In all I found this activity enjoyable and engaging. We were not just sitting around a desk and working on problems on our own, but rather we were standing the whole time and working together as a group.

Busch, A. (January 28, 2014). Too Tall To Measure. [Online Image] Retrieved from http://www.andrewbusch.us/home/too-tall-to-measure-proportions-activity

   When the whole class got back together we delved further into what teaching measurement looks like. We took a look at teaching through literature where while the teacher is reading the book, students can write down any words that have to do with measurement. We spent some time looking at teaching through problem solving and went over a few examples in our groups. We were able to use manipulatives in order to determine what the lowest and highest amount of squares we could add to get a perimeter of 16 based off of the original shapes with 4 squares. . Britney and I worked together and determined that the lowest amount of blocks we could add was three and that the highest was 12.

Fallavollita, E. (November 10, 2017). Measurement. [Image]

We took another look at the water problem example where it was showed to us via video that we can conduct in our classrooms with our students to understand capacity and measurement. A fun example of this can be found here.  Other problem solving activities can also include estimation, visualizing, from specific to general and others. Lastly, we looked at teaching through games such as the games Mini Olympics, Measurement Jeopardy and Area Dice Game, which I was able to complete in our groups.

 

Until next week, happy mathing!