We had a go at sharing what we thought we knew about measurement.

As you can see from our concept map, we already know a lot about measurement. In our teams we tried to sort this data out into similar concepts.

Isn’t it interesting how we all came up with a different way of organising information.

Which posters work well?     What would you change?

Over the past couple of weeks our Preservice teacher, Senija, has been teaching us maths skills and concepts to do with linear measurement.

Linear measurement is where we find out the length or distance of straight lines.

Senija reminded us of the units we could use.

millimetres mm

centimetres cm

metre m

kilometre km

We began by investigating metre distances. First Senija gave us some ribbon and our first job was to measure and cut it into 1 metre lengths.

Once we had our one metre ribbon Senija gave us some challenges. With our partners we tried to :-

jump a metre with and without a run up

stretching to do the splits

experimenting with the length of our body parts

that was fun…

Metre measurement was okay for long distances, but what if we needed to know how long a smaller object was?

Next Senija gave us some interesting activities to practice measuring with centimetres.

Senija reminded us all to begin measuring at the 0. Some rulers have a dead end and we needed to be mindful of lining up the start correctly.

We found objects around the class that were smaller than our ruler.

We were getting really good at using and reading measuring tools such as rulers and tape measures. Of course we kept recording carefully as well.

Continuing to work with our partners we were challenged to find the lengths of parts of our bodies. Now which tool would be useful….mm?

Senija introduced us to the maths term Perimeter The distance around  the outside of a shape.

P = 9 cm + 12 cm + 7 cm

P = 28 cm

It was interesting to see all the different strategies our classmates used to calculate the perimeter.

Some saw that they could double numbers

10 cm doubled is 20 cm, double 20 cm is 40 cm so P=40 cm

Others added

10 cm+10 cm+10 cm+10 cm= 40 cm P=40 cm

or  we saw that you could use multiplication

4×10 cm=40 cm so P=4o cm

Clearly in Maths there is always more than one way to find a solution and it was great to see the different strategies.

It’s always great to be able to try to use new skills, so when Senija asked us to have a go at finding the perimeter of different shapes we didn’t give up, we had a go.

Senija went on to teach us about mass next…. that’s another story.

What part of these activities did you find challenging?

When have you needed to measure something? Why? How did you do it?

What are you looking forward to in learning about other measurements?