Term 3 Measurement Investigations from Home

By Alveare's Resident Measurement Expert, Cam 

Maths is all around us. As many of our LC have learned this term, maths doesn’t just exist in the world of the classroom. Stacking MAB blocks and writing number sentences on a whiteboard is just the tip of the iceberg. Maths is actually present in many everyday activities. Anybody who has been hard at work training to be the next BEPS “MasterChef” would agree, to cook the perfect cake requires the precise measurement of mass, volume, heat and time. To get those ingredients, one must head to the grocery store and calculate or estimate how much food they require and how much it might cost. When we jump on our bikes and go for a zip around the hood, we need to judge how far it might take to come to a stop once we have applied the brakes.

Our students have been eagerly investigating these everyday phenomena, as well as heading along to Cam’s weekly boot camp videos to hone their measurement skills. Getting away from the screen and immersing ourselves in something hands on has kept the smiles wide and the wonder humming. Each lesson was designed using the Primary Connections 5Es framework to guide our inquiry.

First up, we investigated the length of household objects using other household objects, leading on to the philosophical inquiry regarding size and how something is only considered big if we are comparing it to something smaller. We wondered at the remarkably neat lengths and ratios of the human body and got to the bottom of that curious sketch titled Vitruvian Man drawn by Leonardo Da Vinci over half a millennium ago.

We then put our newly found skills to work to measure the perimeter of some interesting things using our favourite informal units. Here we uncovered the value of standard units and identified that some shapes are easier to measure than others, such as squares and rectangles.

Toward the later stages of the term we constructed an iteration of the age-old balance scales using some pretty common stuff such as string, a coat hanger and a few containers. This allowed us to compare the mass of two objects by weighing them using our scales and our understanding of how gravity works.

We concluded our journey by taking advantage of the much-welcomed warm spring weather and compared the capacity of some containers using water volume as our unit.

Our busy little investigators captured some great evidence to show their understanding of these key concepts.