Week 10- Kayleigh Robb

I was nervous today as prepared for my math lesson. As in all classrooms, I have students of varying ability levels and when I developed my unit plan, I decided to introduce a first/second grade level skill to my kindergarteners in an attempt to challenge all of them. I wanted to teach them to use rulers.

Using rulers is a very abstract concept for kindergarteners to learn and my kindergarteners, although very smart, still need the best kind of modeling and scaffolding I can provide. The end product of my unit is a small model of a city that the students design, build and measure, and I want students to be able to use rulers to make measurements of length.

I began my lesson by relating rulers to what we measured with yesterday: sour patch kids. I asked the students how they remembered measuring with the sour patch kids. One student said, "It needed to be straight and one after another, they needed to be close." Then I asked, "What do we measure with that is also straight?"

"A ruler!", many students shouted.

"Right, a ruler! This is a ruler boys and girls." I held up the ruler and continued to make connections between yesterday's lesson and today's.

After my modeling, I had several students model for the rest of the class. I asked students to talk about their thinking, so that students knew how they were taking their measurements. One female student had an especially outstanding explanation of how she thought about using her ruler:

"What I do is I look at my ruler and I need to know to start here (points to the "zero end"). So I know I have to measure from here. I put this end where I want to start measuring and I count up with the numbers like 1-2-3-4. When the thing I want to measure ends, then I stop counting because its not bigger than the number it stops at."

I thought her insight was fascinating. Whether she came to class with some knowledge of measurement or whether she garnered those observations from my modeling and instructions, I thought what she said was truly eloquent for a kindergartener.

The students took to the assignment of measuring shapes fairly well. Although they definitely need more practice, the new skill was something they expressed that they wished to practice more frequently, which is what I have in store with my lesson.