Loved that Lesson - Length!

I'm linking up with Meg at The Teacher Studio for another Loved that Lesson! 

Regular followers of my blog will know that I am on maternity leave so I am doing a lot of reflective blog posts on lessons I taught and didn't have time to blog about at the time! Today I am going back over a year to when I taught Grade 3 and 4 for our Mintie and One Metre Challenge as part of our length investigation. 

The first part of our lesson was the Mintie challenge. Mintie's are lolly/candy we have in Australia and anyone in Australia will know what I am talking about! BUT I don't like Mintie's so we used Fantales (same principle, same packaging etc). Our first job was to eat the Fantale, not a hard request at all, then to tear up the wrapper into as long a piece of wrapper as they could without it breaking. Some children rushed this and their wrapper either tore or was not very long, those who took their time were rewarded with a huge wrapper. Like this one below! Then we measured them. This was the winner. 

 Next we introduced children to the One Metre Challenge. The challenge is that children have to create a 1metre continuous line on a piece of A4 paper. They need to measure as they go and add up as they go - it is really quite tricky, especially if you set them the challenge of only being able to use a length once or they cannot use whole numbers! This task can be as easy or as tricky as you want to make it! Here are some great examples. Some children may measure in cm and some in mm for an extra challenge.

You can download a copy of the 1 Metre Challenge here (I have both meter and metre sheets listed) from google docs.

Head on over to Meg's blog for more!