Catapults

One of the reasons I love teaching measurement is because it’s such a hands on unit.  Any time I can get my littles out of their seats and moving around I grab it – and measurement lends itself so well to that!

We’re still in the middle of our standardized testing, so there isn’t much time left outside of that to incorporate math lessons.  So when a few minutes popped up today, I grabbed them!  A couple days ago, working in teams, we assembled these cool little catapults (directions for assembling them are below).  

Today I brought them out and we had a little launching competition. What better way to grab the attention of a antsy-pants test taker than to tell them that we’re going to shoot things across the room! I had the kids gather things up that they wanted to launch, then each team got some time to practice using their catapult before the big event...  I had each team choose 5 items to compete with.  We shot them off, looking for the longest shot.  It was fun to see the kids weighing their options, thinking about their practices and comparing with each other before deciding what to pick. 

After each round, the kids used their rulers to measure the distance of their shots.  For the last round, we shook things up a bit and used tape measures - they LOVED having the flexible plastic measuring tapes and they loved the ease of figuring out the measurement.

Building a Catapult 

(this should only shoot things 3-6 feet)

Materials

9 thick popsicle sticks

7-8 rubber bands

1 water bottle cap

Items to launch - we used cap erasers, pom pons, plastic coins, etc.

• Stack 7 popsicle sticks together.  Wrap the ends in a couple rubber bands to hold the stack together. 
• Stack 2 popsicle sticks together.  Wrap one end in a couple rubber bands to hold them together.  Open the other end and insert the large stack in the middle.  Then using another rubber band, wrap the large bundle to the small – we criss crossed it in the middle to really hold it down. 
• Finally hot glue the water bottle cap to the end of the catapult.  I did this to a bunch of popsicle sticks years ago and we just keep reusing these parts each year.

Must-Read Monday!

I stumbled upon this Linky this morning, hosted by Teaching Madness, and it made my heart go pitter pat.  It's no secret around school that I love reading - chapter books, picture books, magazines, blogs - you name it, and I'll read it.  So this was such a fun start to my day!  It got me thinking, and I could write an endless blog about this if I'm not careful!  But hopefully I'll be able to join up with these awesome ladies each week, so I'll get a chance to share everything I'm loving!

So even though I have an endless list, I'm just going to start with the books I've read in the past couple weeks.  I'm teaching measurement right now - a unit that I both love and hate.  I love it because it's such a hands on unit, and the kiddos get to be up moving around, hunting things down to measure.  I hate it because I don't think we have enough time to really dig into the chapter, and because our chapter incorporates all types of measurement - in both the metric system and Imperial measurement.  As it is, my littles have a hard time remembering whether you measure the length of a table in inches, pounds, or Fahrenheit degrees... then we throw in centimeters, kilos, and Celsius?  Sheesh - it's a lot of information!  Then add in that measurement always seems to come during our week of standardized testing - it's crazy!  So I try to add in a lot of read alouds to give them a brain break and also incorporate a little learning.  So here are the most recent books I've read... 

 Although a little silly, my kids love shouting out the problem to the apprentice!

        

This is a fun one at our listening center.  I have a good project we do afterwards too!

I have multiple copies of this book (thank you book fair!).  I have them buddy read.

                  

We read this one today.  The kids loved comparing it to their own pets at home.  I even had one little one shout out, "Hey I'm going to try measuring Cooper!"  (Hopefully Cooper is a pet and not a baby brother?!?)

That's all I'm going to share for now, but let me know what you think!  Now that I know about this Linky, I can be more prepared next week!