We've been measuring the "actual" size of lots of real things in the classroom and outside but I wanted to share a favourite book of mine with the students and discuss that how often in illustrations, objects are not their "actual" size for a variety of reasons. I read the intro to the book and explained that in this book, the animals and parts of animals in the illustrations were their actual sizes. Most of the students had not seen this book before so were amazed at the illustrations. We had fun comparing the squid's eye to my head and the great white shark's teeth to the size of our own teeth.
When we got to the page with the gorilla hand on it, the students couldn't believe how huge it was! I had copied the hand for each student and asked them to measure it as many different ways as they could and to compare it the size of some other objects. The students enjoyed comparing the size of their hands to the gorilla's hand.
The students used rulers, metre sticks and measuring tapes to measure different dimensions of the hand in centimetres.
The students measured length, width and perimeter of the hand as well as the lengths and widths of individual fingers. They started getting creative and used dice, glue sticks, magnifying glasses, beanbags and other items from around the classroom to measure their hands.
As the students were measuring away, some employees came in to measure the classroom for new carpet. They used lasers but also measuring tapes to measure the dimensions of the room. It was so great for the students to see how measurement is used in a really real way!
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