Linear Measurement Week Two

Here's some background info on this Math main lesson block:

Linear Measurement & Coordinate Graphing - Intro

Here is what we did this week:

Day Two

• discuss cubit; read excerpt from the Bible which talks about Noah measuring the Ark in cubits (Genesis 6:14-17)
• discuss Origins of Measurements (inch, hand, yard); consider problems with the Royal Cubit in Ancient Egypt; discuss the pace
• read The Librarian Who Measured the Earth by Kathryn Lasky

This week for extra practice at home, students worked on their own with maps/globes, reading scale, and using measuring tools and scale to calculate the length and width of a continent, a mountain range, and a river.

Day Three

• read excerpt from "The Professor Who Did Not Know" (Joseph Louis Lagrange) from Mathematicians are People, Too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians volume 1, pages 83-85, about the beginnings of the metric system and the length of the meter (1 / 10,000,000 of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator)



• look at examples of Canadian speed limit signs in km/h
• draw metric stair; recall last year's block on Measurement and what we learned about the metric system prefixes by studying them in SWI


Metric Stair with the Montessori Stamp Game & Decimal Stamp Game
(love that the metric system's base unit is the tile we call "units")
• do some examples of converting between units of measurement so that students can understand how much easier this is with Lagrange's suggestion of having the metric system based on 10 instead of 12!
  8.32 m = ___ cm
  2.467 L = ____ mL
  2,467 mL = ____ L

Day Four

• read The Gardener by Sarah Stewart



• discuss options for student projects (container gardens, window boxes, raised garden beds, etc.) and hear an update on everyone's planned personal gardening project
• review converting between units of measurement with the metric stair and do practice problems converting to smaller units as a class

Day Five

• read Inch by Inch by Leo Lionni



• have students share Continent Map Skills Mini Projects
• review converting between units of measurement with the metric stair and do practice problems converting to larger units as a class
• give students blank metric stair and ask them to fill in the prefixes (also includes step-by-step instructions for converting between units)
• can there be even bigger or even smaller units of measurement? for what purpose?
• share My Metric Organizer is Bigger Than Your Metric Organizer (Yotta- means one septillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000; Yocto- means one septillionth or 0.000000000000000000000001)

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