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Outside the Classroom Walls - Measurement




I love taking my students outside for learning. There is such an amazing transformation in a student's desire to learn when you give them guidelines, tools, and then let them create the problems and solutions. They expand the lesson more than a worksheet or directed lesson will ever accomplish.


In this lesson, students were given a simple recording sheet and asked to find objects they could measure in centimeters, inches, feet, and yards. Each student had a ruler and a clipboard.

Some students worked in pairs, some in groups, and some preferred to go at it alone. Then they were asked to list objects found outside of the playground that they could measure in the same units. The list were creative and far beyond what they could of thought of in the classroom. By giving them tangible items they could touch and compare, they were then able to visualize other objects with the same measurement. It was hard to get them to stop working. Once we got back to the classroom, we used our collected data and started to convert the measurements. This was an awesome way to differentiate math. Some students used repeated addition, others used grouping and broke numbers apart, while a few even attempted multiplication. Overall, this was a great lesson taken outside the classroom walls.