I found the readings from last week and this week to be very helpful because I do not see measurement in my field placement. One of the readings that I thought was the most helpful was "Navigating Through Measurement". While it states that students really focus and gain understanding of measurement in upper elementary and middle school grades, students in lower elementary still begin to learn the basics. I really thought the idea of teaching young students both standard and non standard units of measurement was a great idea. I think students need to first understand what measurement is and what it entails and they can do this by using blocks and paperclips to show that things can be measured using a wide variety of UNITS, units being the key word here. But I also think it is important to teach them that there are standard units of measure like pounds and inches so that they can see how it will benefit them to learn this in the real world.
With this, I think the article "Big Ideas" does a good job of explaining why measurement is important and what students may think is the importance of measurement. The dialogue between Carl, Juanita, Joan, and Lee explains this well and definitely gave me some good ideas about how to incorporate measurement into my own classroom in the future (comparing things). I think it would really get students engaged if I started a measurement lesson by having them comparing their height or even sometime simple like shoe size and then opening that up into a more formal lesson. This would get them thinking about the idea behind measurement and may help them understand more complex ideas when they arise.
Measurement is one math subject that I was originally a little nervous about teaching. I feel somewhat comfortable with the topic, but I personally don't think that I learned about it very in-depth in my own K-12 education. However, after reading these articles and seeing some of the lesson ideas, I feel a lot more prepared. I totally agree with what you said about making sure to use both standard and nonstandard units- this will definitely help students get a better understanding of the relationships between different measurements. I was actually able to see an example of this in my field placement this week. Students in my class were asked to complete a worksheet that included giving estimates of how many paper clips-long an item was. I thought this was interesting because that was one of the ideas mentioned in the "Navigating Through Measurement" article.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the Navigating article, I also really liked a lot of the ideas in the VandeWalle chapter. The authors made some really good points about how to teach (and not to teach) area. I thought the ideas about doing estimation activities were great too. I agree with what you said about the dialogue in the "Big Ideas" article- having an actual dialogue to read and refer to was really helpful!
I agree with Chelsey, I was pleased to read about something I had not had any real experience with or witnessed in my placement. I also feel as if my own learning of measurement was very weak, which contributes to my desire to learn more about measurement as a teacher.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to teaching measurement, I really like the idea of not necessarily focusing on "standard" units of measurement as this can be what is confusing to the youngest of students. The concept of measuring in general is what is most important at first before introducing specific "standard" measurements. This idea came up in discussion during our last meeting, of which helped me realize the "teacher's role" in measurement. At first,I was excited to realize my teacher had incorporated some measurement into the classroom. However, after discussion, we came to the realization that much of the "measurement experiences" my peers and I had shared all involved the teacher modeling the measuring. This prompted me to remember an article I read in the past in which the teacher set up a lesson in which students were directed to "measure" the classroom rug, but directions and guidance mostly stopped at this. As young students, the idea of measurement was very new and so on their own- students discovered the benefit of using standard versus non standard units (because the length of their feet differed, the unit they chose to use at first). They discovered the difference between length and width, which part of the rug were they to measure? In general, I think this lesson works as an example in proving what we've discussed a lot in our course: never say/do something a student could say/do for themselves.
I also feel it's also important to mention that The Big Idea article was very helpful to me in really understanding what students should know at each grade level in regards to measurement concepts. I honestly feel "lost" in that type of knowledge! I feel comfortable identifying when students should know various mathematical operations, but measurement really is more vague to me!