Review yesterday’s lesson by showing the outline of your foot and the process for measuring the space between your workspace and objects in the classroom. Encourage students to ask questions about what you did and how you did it. Model for students how they may work in pairs to trace each other’s foot on construction paper and cut it out. You might want to review how to place one foot adjacent to the other in order to measure length. Making a transparency of
the Sample Foot Measurement and cutting the feet apart would enable you to model how to iterate one unit to measure a distance greater than a one-foot cutout.
Pair students and have them trace around each other’s foot. Ask them to make multiple cutouts of their foot to measure the distances from their workplace to the identified objects. Using a lightweight poster board makes the foot “measurers” more durable. Have each student measure and record the distance from their “workspace or home base” to the objects you measured in yesterday’s
lesson. (A management strategy could be to have pairs of students record for each other.)
Distribute the Getting There with Our Feet Activity Sheet to students. They can draw pictures of the destination objects and write the number of “feet” required to reach them.
To help develop concepts of time, set a timer or tell the students how long they will have to complete the task. At the appointed time, have students gather with pairs seated beside each other. Have each set of students share the result of their measurement with each other. Invite several students to volunteer to share their results. Discuss the differences in measures and how they happen.
This lesson gives opportunity for students to practice measurement skills. It is a time when you can monitor and document the number of students who are able to measure with the expected accuracy appropriate for the age and experience of your children. This information allows you to decide, using data, whether students are ready for the next lesson or need additional practice with the concepts in this lesson.
