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Math Update 1/09

Welcome back (again)!
Today in math we finished up our activity from Tuesday. The students practiced measuring and also were introduced to the symbol 1/2 in order to show that a measurement was in between two numbers. We do not have the students use the symbol 1/2 to indicate a half of their measuring tool, but rather introduce it as a way to show that we are in between two whole numbers, whether it be a little or a lot. In fact, when I write it on the board I don’t even call it a half! I just say “and a little more.”  We will get into what the actual term “half” stands for next week, however we will not use fractions smaller than 1/2 on our worksheets so the symbol will continue to stand for “and a little bit more” in classroom measurement activities.
For students who measured and completed their worksheet before others today, I asked them to measure a piece of tape with 2 different measurement tools: tiles and cubes. The students had the opportunity to see that the tape lines had different measurements depending on the tool they were using, so it was important to label the answers we wrote! Some students even got as far as discussing why the numbers were different and which measuring tool was smaller and how that impacted their answers.