Measurement Olympics

This past week my class has been getting into the Olympic spirit by hosting our own Olympics in our classroom. We are currently working on the common core measurement standards in math, so I thought what better way to learn and practice our measurement than to make it an Olympic event!

We started out by meeting the different types of measurement tools, and hosting a mini Olympics to determine which tool was the best for each measurement job. We used my Measurement Olympics unit on TpT to record our answers. After we became familiar with the various measurement tools (we learned about a ruler, yardstick and measuring tape), we started to learn about the various units of measurement.

We learned about inches, feet, yards, centimeters and meters. The students went around the room, and categorized various objects from the room into different units of measurement.

 I allowed the students to pick the objects out around the room for themselves, but I challenged them to find at least 2 objects in the room that would fit into each unit of measurement category. They were also able to carry around a ruler to help them check their estimates. This activity really helped the students get a concrete idea of about how big each unit of measurement really was.

After we had a good idea of the units of measurement we moved on to the fun stuff... using our rulers to measure! We did several practice activities measuring with our rulers before the Olympics started.

 First we measured ourselves, and traced our bodies onto butcher paper. The students measured the length of their partners leg, foot, arm, hand and face. After the students traced their bodies onto butcher paper we added their measurements onto their official Olympian Card, and hung their cutouts around the room to decorate for the Olympics.

Next, we practiced our measurement one more time before the big day by measuring the arenas.

I made half of the arena spaces into straight lines, and half of the arena spaces into squares or triangles. I taped down yarn on the floor to be our arena spaces, but duck tape would have worked well also. One of the advantages of having squares and triangles, was it allowed students to practice addition with regrouping using three and four two digit numbers (always a win when you can review other standards as well)! Have straight lines and shapes also helped with differentiation. I was able to send my students who had mastered the skill of measuring to work on the harder shapes first, while I worked on measuring the straight lines with the students who were struggling.

Finally, after all of our hard work preparing it was time for the Olympics!

Trying to set a record at the half pipe!

Measuring their cotton ball's distance at the cotton puck shoot out.

Measuring his speed skating distance.

Measuring and comparing the bobsled tracks.

Measuring the distance his ball traveled at alpine skiing. 

 The students competed in six different Olympic events, and at each event they were actively involved in a competition which required them to measure. The favorites were the half pipe jump where I marked the wall with tape in 1 foot increments, and challenged the students to see how many feet they could jump off the ground. There was some very heavy competition here! Another favorite was the speed skate race. Students stepped on paper plates, and had 5 seconds to "skate" across the carpet as far as they could.

Overall the students loved the Measurement Olympics, and it was an awesome was for us to get up and moving after being stuck inside for months on end with this awful winter.