Lesson recap
Here were the first three components of my (MUCH more extensive) lesson plan, which I estimated would take 6-8 minutes:
Here, instead, is an outline of how the entire lesson went. While I added components, the lesson doesn’t extend much farther than these three sections over the course of roughly 40 minutes. (This is just an overview; the next section will feature Analysis.
Notes from my Penn Mentor's observation can be found here (4 pages):
- Introduction of activity and exploration of practical applications of precise measurement
- Teacher modeling of measurement using full and half inches (with room for student participation & assessment)
- Independent measurement task: Individuals receive lists of lengths and box of objects, must identify objects that match the listed lengths
Here, instead, is an outline of how the entire lesson went. While I added components, the lesson doesn’t extend much farther than these three sections over the course of roughly 40 minutes. (This is just an overview; the next section will feature Analysis.
- Introduction of activity and exploration of practical applications of precise measurement
- Basic measurement mini-lesson
- One volunteer was invited to demonstrate measuring a pencil – he lines up the pencil far askew from the ruler, and gets a measurement much shorter than the actual pencil length
- Mini-lesson on how to use a ruler
- Half-inches mini-lesson
- Short description of half-inches
- Give each pencil a pencil, and ask them to draw a line on their pencil showing “one inch” (i.e. extend the “one inch” line so there is a one-inch rectangle at the end of the ruler)
- Ask students to draw another line to split that rectangle into two parts/in half
- Discussion and mini-lesson on half inches.
- During this, it became clear that some or all students did not have a clear concept of conservation.
- Mini-lesson on conservation
- An informal assessment to determine which students understood conservation (none seemed both correct and confident; some were confidently incorrect, and others seemed unsure).
- Discussion, including self-connections (i.e., How tall are you? How do you know? Are you still that tall when you aren’t being measured?)
- Another informal assessment to determine whether students were changing their minds (i.e., had students measure an object and tell me whether it was the same length when placed in various positions – in my hand, on my head, on the table, then against the middle of the ruler; one student insisted that it was no longer six inches once it was misaligned with the ruler)
- Direct instruction: rulers measure length, but don’t change it.
- Independent measurement task
- Instructions (including asking students only to use the “inches” side)
- Although I had prepared handouts with four measurements on them (differentiated, and ordered from “easiest” to “hardest”), I drew a line under the first two and told the students that they were only expected to find objects for the first two measurements for now.
- Independent measurement
- One student finished much more quickly than others, including finishing the other measurements on her sheet and finding multiple objects for some lengths. Her partner, meanwhile, was struggling to find a “2-inch” object; I asked the student who was ahead to look through their bin and set out objects that looked like they might be 2 inches for her partner to measure.
- Whole group discussion
- What was the strategy that you used that made it easiest to figure out how long something was? (Each student was asked to think about it for a little while, then share one.)
Notes from my Penn Mentor's observation can be found here (4 pages):
My own notes from meeting with my Penn Mentor after the lesson: