Hello All, This past week was so much fun. Between creating snowmen, playing in fake snow and having a cotton ball snowball fight we had a great time. One of my favorite activities was a non-standard measurement activity, measuring ourselves against numbered snowballs. I started by taping 30 numbered snowballs from bottom to top on my cabinet and then I hung a graph with each child's name and the numbers 1-30 with the title "How many snowballs tall are you?" Before starting the activity we counted the snowballs and I had each student estimate how many snowballs tall they would be, I also had them guess for me. I was surprised at how many estimations were close or correct.
I recorded their estimations on the dry erase board and we then stood by the snowballs one at a time. We recorded our height on the bar graph. We talked about who was the tallest and who was the shortest, which children were close to the same height etc.
After everyone had a chance to be measured we went back to our guesses and compared our true height to what our estimation was. I marked their estimation in yellow on the graph to show how far or how close their guess was.
Yes, this is me standing next to the snowballs, I was 22 snowballs tall, the tallest in the class. I'm glad we weren't measuring girth! HaHa! This was a great learning activity that the class realy got into, they were engaged and surprised by all of the information we gathered about each other. Get your free copy of this activity from the following link:
How many snowballs tall are you? Freebie!
This is just one activity from my new Snowman Math and Literacy Unit, please take a minute to check it out in my TpT store!
Till next time,
Christine
Hello! What were some problems you encountered when teaching the snowman math unit? I can see that you did this as a small group lesson. Other than writing this out on chart paper, did you use any technology for students to track their height?
ReplyDeleteHi Kristal, Thank you so much for your questions. I am fortunate enough to have a small class of 12 and we did complete it as a whole group but if you have almost double the children I do think breaking it up into small groups would be helpful. The only issues I ran into were some children wanting to be first or not patient to wait their turn so some redirection was necessary. I also had some who are not as good with their numbers as others so we had some calling out of the wrong numbers. I helped with this by holding a ruler above a few of the kids heads and counting up to the number. As far as technology I did not use any with this activity. Now that you mention it though we could have created a graph in excel on our classroom laptop or my tablet. Thanks for the sparkling idea! Blessings, Christine
ReplyDelete