Fish in the Bucket and Other Things…

The last two weeks in our room have been focused primarily on measurement when it comes to math.  We spent two days on this terrific lesson originally created by Marilyn Burns.  It was one of my favorite lessons of the year!

Students were given various colors of construction paper and each made three fish of different sizes.

They returned the precious fish to the bucket.

We discussed what it means to compare lengths and we even demonstrated how we compared our heights for our recent Spring picture day.

Next I told them that it was our job to compare the length of fish.  We discussed the best ways to measure the fish and decided that the quickest way was to hold them up to each other.

 As we began ordering the length of the fish from greatest to least, they started lining them up end to end. 

 This process went on for a few minutes.

 It became clear that there were distinct groupings of fish.  This was the small to tiny range.

 Once all the fish were ordered we had to go back and check our findings as well as get a little more math specific.

 The snap cubes were chosen as the units of measurement. 

Students began to measure and record the number of units long each fish was.  

 During this process we found a few surprises with our ordering of fish and corrected them.  We also drew lines over groups of fish that were all measuring the same number.  Amazingly we had 13 fish that all measured 6 snap cubes long even though everything was hand drawn. 

Our last step was to find a LONG enough spot to place all this mathematical thinking!  

 These three goofballs were way too excited to be helping teacher put this up in the hallway.

 Hope that lesson might bring you as much fun in learning as it did for us!

 Another success we had this week was at the writing center.  We have enjoyed our March story starters for two weeks straight now!

And finally I uploaded a product that I have been wanting for WAY too long!  Every week I always wish we had a sorting sheet.  There’s so many ways I want to use this but I always resorted to scratch paper or student journals etc.  Now I have the paper I need ready to go for every single week!