Students have been busy using non-standard measures this week to find length, width and height of different things in school. Non-standard is a way for children to learn how to measure, why we measure, compare and progress towards understanding why we need standard measures.
Students used hands, handspans and feet and we repeated this to improve our ability to start at the correct place, measure the whole length- with no gaps and then draw and write our measurements. It is a multi-step process and everyone tried hard and helped each other.
We then had a lot of fun using blocks, pens, cubes and even gluesticks to measure items in our class and also our friends! Students were encouraged to be increasingly precise about how and what they recorded and many did very well.
When we compared our measurements, several students could explain why we had different measurement: ‘they must have left space”, ‘he used something different to do it” and ‘our feet are not the same, some are small”. This shows they are ready to think about and start using standard units of measurement. Great work 1A!