Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Navigating through Measurement
The article I decided to focus my post on this week is the Navigating through measurements because it particularly pertains to grades 3-5, which are the grades I hope to one day teach. The article started off by saying “Measurement is one of the most fundamental of all mathematical processes” and I couldn’t agree more. I see this a lot in my placement, being in a kindergarten classroom I see the majority of math time being spent on simple counting routines. Every day the go over the calendar and count how many days they have been in school. They represent this number using money (dollars and cents) along with fish (because they are the “fish room”) and with sticks that they count and separate out by hundreds, tens, and ones. One thing I found interesting while reading was “instruction during grades 3-5 places more emphasis on developing familiarity with standard units in both customary (English) and metric systems.” I know I am in kindergarten and perhaps that’s why I don’t see any instruction on the metric system, but I was wondering if Laruen or Gabrielle have seen in being taught in their placements, and if so how important or how much of a role does it have? I think we should start teaching students the metric system for an early age, perhaps even earlier then 3rd grade, what do you guys think? The article also mentioned “children in prekindergarten through grade 2 should have similar hands on experiences to lay a foundation for other measurements concepts.” I agree with this statement and see it in my placement. There is a center during math time that has a large scale and the students are able to make hypothesis on what they believe will be heavier. I thought this was a really center for students to do, because it is a more fun approach to learning about mass and weight without dealing with such large concepts. What evidence of this do you guys see in your placements?
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Rose, I also really enjoyed this artile on measurement. I have not seen much measuring in my field placement, and this upsets me because I feel the importance of measurement is often over looked. In particular, I have seen many students, me included that have much difficulty when it comes to converting units and simply keeping track of the appropriate units. According to the Thompson and Preston article, Bishop argues that "measurement is one of six fundamental activities that are found in all cultures throughout the world and are necessary and sufficient for developing mathematical knowledge. Additionally, on average, students around the world answered a lower percentage of measurement items than any other, with US students answering only 39% correctly. In the US particular weaknesses include unit conversions and calculation of volume, circumference, and estimation" (Thompson and Preston, 2004). I think measurement and unit conversion is used multiple times in our everyday lives, without the sufficient competence of most of our citizens. This leads to a whole mess of things such as over-use of fossil fuels, over eating, and unnecessary wasting. Sorry I sort of went off on a tangent, but you know me that happens a lot :) To wrap up, I do not see enough emphasis on measurement or estimation. Gabe, what about you?
ReplyDeleteRosa and Lauren, thanks for asking!
ReplyDeleteI have noticed measurements being a large part of our classroom also, but only in Math class. I feel like it could be incorporated more throughout the day. There are many opportunities to bring in Math. My CT always incorporates measurements into Math, but I haven't seen it incorporated it into other subjects during the day. Some ideas would be perhaps taking the temperature outside, and using subtraction to find the difference between every day, and elaborating more on that. We could also count the days of the year, etc. I feel like we need to incorporate measurement more into our placements. I think it would also be fun to measure height by the door in feet in inches, so they know when to use those measurement terms, and then subtract at the end of the year, and find the difference, who grew more, etc!