Tuning into Length

To continue exploring our central idea: 

we are going to explore measuring length as a means of understanding how we use decimals in real life situations. 

To arouse some curiosity and spark some deep thinking towards our unit on measuring length, partners were given the following units of measurement which are all equivalent to 1 metre:

They had several copies of these and discussed different ways they could group them.  

As they sorted into groups, they were encouraged to use the following symbols and note their thinking:

                          

Listening into the discussions, it was interesting to note who knew about the metric and imperial systems and equally, who was able to creatively group them in different ways by making connections.  

It was also really interesting to listen to ways the children were explaining their theories or understandings with their partners as they thought deeper about the units. 

The posters they had made were then shared around in a circle and we discussed what the other groups had thought of that we mightn't have.  This helped the children to broaden their own thinking and understandings. 

Samples:  

To help make our unit into length student-owned, we then thought of one burning question we had from this thinking activity and collated these together that we wanted to discover:

We had some really interesting questions to guide our enquiry into length now. I am also really curious about some of these wonderings too! :)  So we then examined those and created some lines of enquiry that would encompass most of our wonderings:

From this provocation, we were able to create a great maths unit that gives a lot of scope for the children to enquire into what interests them and at their own levels of skills / understandings.