hands-on length activities!

We started a new unit in math this week on length. I *love* teaching measurement- it's so much fun and interactive and the kids always get into it too!

In kindergarten we focus on nonstandard and comparative measurement. We watched this fabulous "Sid Science Kid" clip about measurement and then put the ideas to practice!

I had a student lay on the carpet and we talked about lining up the edges of our "unit" without leaving spaces. The black towers of cubes are laid down so that my volunteer would know where she needed to line up her feet next. Then, as kids always are- they were curious about how many cubes our carpet was long. They could have gone on ALL day measuring with them!

The next day I had my students work with their table groups to compare pieces of string. Each child had a piece of yarn. The brown yarn was the piece that we compared against. We are really working on using language such as "longer than" and "shorter than" and being able to justify our answers. 

I found this fabulous page from Maria at Kinder-Craze and my kids practiced independently using it. It was a hit! I love how simple it is and it's a quick check for understanding.

Hopefully I will be back to you this weekend with the rest of our week in Math!