But the snow swirling outside the windows of Room 123 captivated the class! Students noticed the blizzard-like view just as we were about to start math instruction, and found it hard to switch their attention back to the classroom.
Fortunately, the day’s lesson was on measurement and it took just a little tweaking to make it more meaningful. Students made predictions about how much snow they thought would fall, and wrote their predictions on post-its. After a brief discussion, students determined that creating a graph was the best way to display their predictions.
After listening to their classmates’ thinking and watching the snow fly, a few students wanted to change their predictions. Most moved their post-its to higher amounts!
Then students used rulers to draw line segments equal to their predictions. After I introduced the centimeter, they remeasured the line segments in centimeters.
Finally, we used their metric measurements to convert the graph to centimeters!
Near the end of the day, the snow had just about stopped falling. We measured the amount of snow outside the back door and found we had gotten about 2 inches or 5 centimeters of snow. (The class was a bit disappointed with the total, but I confess I was not!)
It looks like a lot of thinking was happening in Room 123! The graph made it easy for me to see your predictions. Good idea!