Lately in our morning meetings, we've been showing our "moves" as a student-initiated connection to our current unit of inquiry. Last week Henry and Frankie began focusing on different jumps. Their friends were inspired and also began showing different jumps. Since then, every day a few students have wanted to show jumps. Henry and Frankie have been calling them "big jumps" or "small jumps". There were disagreements though and different ideas about whether the jumps were big or small.
Ms. Alison saw a connection to measurement here and asked the students: How do we know if a jump is big or small?
A few opinions were shared, then Daniel suggested that we use the same measuring tape we used to measure our heights. Everyone thought this was a good idea. Ms. Alison proposed that we go outside to measure our jumps and reminded everyone that we could use words like 'long', 'short', 'longer' and 'shorter' to describe the size of jumps. So we all took turns jumping and then marking where we landed in chalk. Once we'd all jumped we compared how far the chalk marks were from the yellow line where we all started jumping and discussed who had jumped 'shorter' or 'longer'. Everyone wanted to know though, Who had the biggest jump? Who had jumped the longest?
Ms. Alison saw a connection to measurement here and asked the students: How do we know if a jump is big or small?
A few opinions were shared, then Daniel suggested that we use the same measuring tape we used to measure our heights. Everyone thought this was a good idea. Ms. Alison proposed that we go outside to measure our jumps and reminded everyone that we could use words like 'long', 'short', 'longer' and 'shorter' to describe the size of jumps. So we all took turns jumping and then marking where we landed in chalk. Once we'd all jumped we compared how far the chalk marks were from the yellow line where we all started jumping and discussed who had jumped 'shorter' or 'longer'. Everyone wanted to know though, Who had the biggest jump? Who had jumped the longest?
There were some different ideas about whose chalk line was furthest from the yellow line. Daniel then reminded us that we had the measuring tape to use, so we lined it up to measure each jump. We learned that you have to line up the part of the measuring tape with the '0' with the place you start jumping. Then we looked at the numbers that matched the chalk line representing where we jumped to. Some of us knew the really high numbers that we were seeing. When we compared them we saw that Wilma's number was the biggest which meant she had the 'biggest' or 'longest' jump.
Since this experience we've still been jumping in our Morning Meetings, but are using different words to describe our jumps, like 'long', 'far', 'short', and 'high'....as well as 'big' and 'small'.
Since this experience we've still been jumping in our Morning Meetings, but are using different words to describe our jumps, like 'long', 'far', 'short', and 'high'....as well as 'big' and 'small'.