Measuring Mania

These past couple of weeks, the students have been doing some measuring using both non-standard units of measure such as dominos, letter tiles, crayons, hands, etc. as well using standard units of measure, such as centimetres, and metres.  They had a lot of fun working with the clock partners to rotate through stations.

This group measured the back table with different sized play cars...
This lead to an interesting discussion!  I asked them to describe what
they discovered.   It didn't seem to concern them that some of the play cars
they used were different lengths... some much longer than others.   I asked
if this made a difference in their results...  they agreed that it did but were
unsure how to measure the long length of the table using units of like size
since they did not have enough cars of equal length ~ one student showed
the others how to line up a car at the edge of the table, make a mark, and
either add a car of similar size or move the previous car to the beginning
of the mark - aligning the car(s) in a straight line without overlapping
gaps ~ an "ah-ha" moment!