Snowman name math and measuring activity

We had a lot of fun in grade one this week. We made long snowman using our names. I got the ideas from Art with Ms. James.

First students had to plan out their snowman. We wrote their names in our journals and counted the number of letters. We then added + 1 because they needed to add a ball for the head. We drew that many balls on the page and wrote our names.... and added a little face too. We knew that each piece of paper had 4 snowballs on it. We had to find out how many sheets of paper we would need to complete the project. You can download circle template here.

We then created our snowmen. We cut off any excess purple paper. Once we were done making them we all worked together to sort them in order of length. We noticed that even though some snowmen had the same amount of circles they were not the same length. We realized that the reason was that some students had overlapped their circles and some didn't. We decided that to make a good measurement we needed to make sure we didn't overlap our measuring tools because it changed the measurement.

What did I learn at school today? Kids sometimes learn best when you let them muddle their way though. This activity was a great way to get kids to think through a problem and come to their own conclusions. I'd told them many times that in order to measure we needed to make sure that the items didn't overlap but some still struggled with this. Once they saw the snowmen and worked through the problem themselves it was much easier for them to understand.

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What I learned at school today

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