"We need to measure the airplane."
Each day when the kids enter the room, they sign in to let me know they are at school and answer the daily question.Today our daily question said, “How long is our airplane? 10 feet, 20 feet, or 30 feet?”This question brought up a lot of conversation on measurement and estimation during our arrival activities. What is a good estimation? How do you know when you’ve made a good estimation? How do we learn to become good estimators? While friends were pondering these questions and engaging in conversation, I began to notice several children grab a material and begin lining it up against the side of the airplane. I asked Sascha what she was doing. “We’re using the inch worms!” she exclaimed. “Why?” I asked. Journey answered for her friend, “We need to measure the airplane.” The two friends were using one of our math workshop tools, inchworms, which are little worms that are one inch exactly. Several other children noticed what the girls were doing and became interested.
Messi assists with the inchworm measurement.
Once about half the plane was surrounded by inch worms, we reached a problem. “Wait! Wait!” Ruth ran over and tried to stop the friends from building. I asked Ruth why she wanted them to stop. “They don’t need to build around the whole way.” I asked her why. Ruth explained that since half of the plane had been measured, we didn’t really need to measure the whole way around, because this was measuring length. Ruth was paitient and articulate as she drew a diagram and showed it to her friends.
Ruth explains why the inchworms should stop.
The friends agreed that Ruth was right, we could stop. “So now what?” Lucas asked. We decided next that we needed to count the inch worms to see how many inches the plane was across. Cameron and Carriea worked together to count. Cameron put his finger on each worm as Carriea said what number worm it was. As they got higher and higher, into the hundreds, more friends became excited and joined in the counting.
Cameron carefully marks the worms counted with his finger.
The excitement grew as we counted more nad more worms. “Two hundred eighty, two hundred eighty-one, two hundred eighty-two, two hundred eighty-three!!!” The kids all cheered.
So excited to count!
“Wait a second! That number is not part of our daily question!” Lucas brought up a good point. Our class was stuck. How could we have counted two hundred eighty-three inches and not have that be one of the three choices on the daily question. Monica suggested, “It’s not in feet!”We then discussed what exactly a foot was and that there were twelve inches in a foot. A friend suggested we break up the inch worms in groups of twelve, to show how many feet. The kids were so paitient as we took turns breaking up the two hundred eighty-three inch worms into little groups and neatly placed them on the floor. After all groups were created, we counted them together. We counted twenty-three groups of eleven and a group of ten, so our airplane is approximately twenty-four feet long! WOW!
Two hundred eighty-three inches. WOW!
Tags: arithmetic, capable, curious, motivation, project, thinking
