Wow...I just suffered an immeasurably frustrating day at work. I developed a couple of easy activities to ease some of my students into the "joy" of finding the measure of objects in INCHES. I made sure they were able to line up rulers on the zero (as opposed to the edge of the ruler), count the number of sixteenths of an inch and reduce the fractions properly. I even found a cool site on the web that has printable rulers so you don't have students whacking each other with real ones.
After all this preparation, I handed them a worksheet that included pictures of objects I wanted them to measure. I made sure students understood that they were not measuring the pictures, but the actual objects I brought to class (playing cards, CDs, paper clips, etc.) I thought it would be so inanely simple that most students would be able to breeze through it in no time.
I was wrong.
One student (a junior) commented, "Is that all there is to reading a ruler? I never knew how before."
Number of students caught measuring the pictures instead of the actual objects? Three...in one class.
Found one student measuring everything in centimeters.
Since the ruler wasn't long enough to measure the length of a std. piece of paper, I taught students to mark where the ruler ended and move the ruler to find a second measurement of the remaining part. When I asked what they should do with the two measurements (in this case 9" and 2") a student responded "times?" When I said that was wrong, she guessed, "divide?"
One student tried to be tricky and wrote the the length of a piece of paper was 11" and that the width was also 11". When I asked him if he knew that having both sides of the paper being the same size would make it a square, he said, "Yes." When I asked him if the piece of paper was square, he replied, "No...Oh!" He snatched the worksheet from my hand to correct his answer and I thought I had logically stepped him through the necessary thought process to find his own mistakes. When he handed me the paper again, I noticed his answers were changed...changed to "Height = 11 1/2 inches Width = 11 1/2 inches"
After all this preparation, I handed them a worksheet that included pictures of objects I wanted them to measure. I made sure students understood that they were not measuring the pictures, but the actual objects I brought to class (playing cards, CDs, paper clips, etc.) I thought it would be so inanely simple that most students would be able to breeze through it in no time.
I was wrong.
One student (a junior) commented, "Is that all there is to reading a ruler? I never knew how before."
Number of students caught measuring the pictures instead of the actual objects? Three...in one class.
Found one student measuring everything in centimeters.
Since the ruler wasn't long enough to measure the length of a std. piece of paper, I taught students to mark where the ruler ended and move the ruler to find a second measurement of the remaining part. When I asked what they should do with the two measurements (in this case 9" and 2") a student responded "times?" When I said that was wrong, she guessed, "divide?"
One student tried to be tricky and wrote the the length of a piece of paper was 11" and that the width was also 11". When I asked him if he knew that having both sides of the paper being the same size would make it a square, he said, "Yes." When I asked him if the piece of paper was square, he replied, "No...Oh!" He snatched the worksheet from my hand to correct his answer and I thought I had logically stepped him through the necessary thought process to find his own mistakes. When he handed me the paper again, I noticed his answers were changed...changed to "Height = 11 1/2 inches Width = 11 1/2 inches"
*sigh*
No comments:
Post a Comment