Today we continued working on measuring fish and doing some measurement related story problems. A common ‘problem area’ for students is understanding how to write their answer when a partial tile is needed to cover the fish completely. When students are getting this wrong it is usually because they are counting all of the tiles and then writing 1/2 after it instead of counting the whole tiles used separate from the partial tile. For example, if a fish measures 5 1/2, a student may cover the fish and write their answer as 6 because there are 6 total tiles they can count, even though only 1/2 of the tile is needed to cover the fish. Since they know they only used part of the tile they will just write 1/2 on the end of their answer because they know it should be there, making their answer 6 1/2 instead of 5 1/2.
Tomorrow we will do an assessment where I observe students measuring fish to make sure they are using the behaviors we’ve talked about as expectations for measuring in class. Those would be: measuring the longest side, measuring from beginning to end, measuring in a straight line, measuring with the tiles touching, correctly counting and writing how many tiles were used.