Shapes and Measuring

Last week, just before putting on our Wax Museum, we got some practice measuring height, length, and width in both inches and centimeters as we measured our character portraits before putting them on display!

We measured the height of our characters as well as the length and width of different parts of their body

We've also continued to observe and measure our bean plants, which we were able to bring home on Friday! Many of our bean plants are already over a FOOT tall!

We've also begun to re-familiarize ourselves with the names and attributes of 2D and 3D Shapes! We've played several games to help us learn more about shapes, including I Have, Who Has Shapes Edition and Shapes Jeopardy! 

On Friday, we challenged ourselves to create different 2D shapes by folding paper to make their edges and vertices. Some were very tricky to make, but we did it!

We will continue to explore shapes as well as measuring as we begin working on finding a shapes' area and perimeter!

Great Estimations

This week, we took our measuring skills outside to complete our biggest measuring challenge yet--the FIELD!

We tied a piece of yarn to the fence beside the playground. Before taking our yarn across the field, we estimated in yards how long we thought the field might be. Our estimations ranged from 51 yards to 1,100 yards, but many of us estimated it would be around 100-150 yards. 

We each took turns pulling the yarn across the field while the rest of us followed and frolicked in the beautiful spring weather 

When we finally reached the other side, we cut the yarn from the yarn ball and then cut our giant piece of yarn into smaller pieces that each of us took back to the classroom and measured. 

Once we measured our pieces of yarn in feet, we added the lengths of our yarn pieces to the lengths measured by our table mates, and afterwards we added those 5 numbers together for a grand total of 414 ft!

Since we know 100 yards= 300 feet, we knew many of our estimations were not too far off! We even did some dividing (watch out, 3rd and 4th grade!) and discovered the field was about 138 yards! And now, we are left wondering why the New England Patriots don't use our field to practice-- we would like to let them know they have an open invitation :)

Measuring Madness!

We began to really dive into measuring this week, as we started to make all sorts of measurements! 

We began by making  a list of personal references that we could look to when estimating different lengths. We worked with our table groups to find objects around our classroom that were about 1 inch,  1 foot, 1 yard, 1 centimeter, 1 decimeter, or 1 meter. While we discovered inch and foot-long objects were slightly larger than objects that were 1 centimeter or 1 decimeter, objects that were 1 yard long were slightly shorter than objects that were 1 centimeter. We used rulers and meter sticks to do our measuring. 

1 inch =2.54 centimeters

12 inches= 1 foot

10 centimeters=1 decimeter

12 inches= 3 feet= 1 yard

100 centimeters= 10 decimeters= 1 meter

we even used our place value knowledge to figure out that one kilometer equals 100,000 centimeters!

Later in the week, we did some measuring on ourselves using measuring tapes. We measured our heights, the lengths of our legs, arms, and hands, the circumference around our heads, and more! 

On Friday, we did some estimating using our new measuring knowledge. We worked with a partner and decided on three distances we would measure within our classroom. After we made our estimations, we measured the distances in yards using our measuring tapes. 

We will continue to do some measuring next week with our fairy tale characters as we prepare for the Wax Museum! 

Unifix World Record?!

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking a lot about measurements and world-record lengths, especially since we've been learning so much about our very tall friends the sunflowers! At the end of math the other day, we tried to make a record-breaking unifix cube chain that swerved and curved around our classroom. There is not currently a world record for the longest unifix cube chain, but I am guessing over 30 ft. comes pretty close!