How Big is a Foot?

We are having fun learning about measurement this week in math! First, we read "How Big is a Foot?" by Rolf Myller. This is a story about a king who wants to give his wife a new bed, so he uses his feet to measure her. But when the carpenter measures using his own feet, the bed turns out too small! We stopped at that part and pair-shared ideas for why the bed was too small. Then we worked with partners to measure various classroom objects using our feet. Each group had a measurer and a recorder. Finally, we discussed our data and why we all got different measurements...leading to the realization that we all have different sized feet and we all need to use the same sized units to measure. This led us into today's lesson...

Today, we read "Inch by Inch" by Leo Lionni. This is a cute story about an inchworm who measures various birds...until he inches out of sight! After reading, we discussed how we could use "inchworms" to measure items around our desks (how to start at the edge and line up cubes with no gaps, etc). Since I don't have these adorable inchworm manipulatives, we just used linking cubes and pretended they were inchworms. I called out various items for the inchworms to measure and the kids worked with their partners to estimate and measure each object. Here is a copy of my recording sheet.