This unit engages students in activities that focus on measurement and geometry. Students connect what they see and do each day with practical uses of mathematics. Maps are tools that incorporate mathematical concepts and show spatial relationships, principles of location, and navigation.
The sequence of lessons in this unit plan builds skills for measuring with non-standard units and describing, naming, interpreting, and representing relative positions in space. Students investigate various areas and objects they see each day to apply ideas of navigating in space and understanding the relationships among these various elements.
Individual Lessons
Lesson 1 - Measuring with Teacher’s Feet
In this lesson, students use nonstandard units to measure the distance between objects found in their classroom. They create a nonstandard unit by using an outline of the teacher’s foot and cutting around it to use as a “measurer.” Students generate a list of four or five objects in the classroom from which they will measure the distance to their workspace.
Lesson 2 - Measuring with Our Foot
Students measure the same distances as in the previous lesson using an outline cutout of their own foot. This enables students to practice using nonstandard units and to compare the measurement totals using their feet and the teacher’s foot.
Lesson 3 - Learning to Measure with Ladybug
The mathematical foci of this lesson are geometric concepts, location, navigation, direction, and spatial relationships and measurement concepts, using nonstandard units to measure a distance, and the iteration of units, measurement by using the same unit of measure repeatedly to determine the total. Students practice measuring with multiple units and a single unit following the methods modeled by the teacher and those appropriate for their level of understanding.
Lesson 4 - Helping Ladybug Hide with Arrows and Angles
In this lesson, students use an applet (technology tool) to hide a ladybug under a leaf. This requires experimentation, planning, and understanding of spatial relationships and visual memory.
Lesson 5 - Handy Map
This lesson engages students in creating a map of their hands. It provides purpose for using directional or positional words with mapping. The teacher draws a map of his or her hands and begins mapping them using words the students suggest. This allows the teacher to assess positional concepts students currently know and to build on that knowledge. Students create a simple map.
Lesson 6 - Facing Up
In this lesson, students create a map of their face and practice locating different parts using the geometric and measurement concepts they have learned in previous lessons, including location, navigation, spatial relationships, and measurement with nonstandard units. Students reproduce their face and describe it to reinforce their knowledge and skills of measuring and mapping. Using these familiar territories connects mathematics with daily encounters.
