Jones- Week 9

Kallie Jones
Week 9- November 1

This week, I started my Guided Lead Teaching and I am teaching Measurement. The first things that students were asked to do were to find non-standard units of measurements and discuss how they could measure with those to measure different things. For the whole group lesson, students had to use the average shoe shoe size of the class and find things that were the same length. In the essence of time, I tweaked this lesson a bit. I took the heel to toe measurements of 4 students and we did the average of those four students measurements and that became our non standard unit of measure. The average was 46.5 centimeters. The students had to find things in the classroom that were 46.5 centimeter long. This activity proved to be successful because students were able to find things that were 46.5 centimeters. Students asked me if they could find things that were a little bit longer than 46.5 centimeters because most of the things of in the classroom were longer than t46.5 cm. I told them yes. I told them yes because sometimes it is better to over measure so that you can make sure that you have enough space if you went to buy something like carpet so that you can make sure that you have enough.
When students turned in their work, I found one student who seemed to have an issue with the activity. I took the student aside and had them explain to me why they measured what they measured. I wanted this particular student to explain to me why they measured what they measure because everything that they measured was over 70 cm long which was not close to what they were supposed to measuring. When I asked the student why their measurements were so far away from 46.5 cm, she said "I was just measuring". This reveals that when given a certain length to find this student is not able to do it in this instance which means there is a gap in her understanding of using measurements and finding things to fit a certain length of measurement using non standard units of measure. Two ways I might advance this students understanding are to have the student identify their own non standard units of measure and measure with it and have the student work with other students when trying to find things of a certain length. A future task that this student may find fruitful may be finding things of  certain length in their home and measuring them using their own non standard unit of measure. This may make this more concrete for them.