Meaningful Play

Today, some of the students began building long stacks using toys called linking (or unifix) cubes. Eventually, they used the entire bin and had made a line across the length of the classroom, from one table to another. It was fascinating to watch the students build, noticing that their structure would fall without support. 

They began using chairs as support, but noticed that their line of cubes still sagged. Some students tried unsuccessfully to build vertical supports for this cube line. I overheard one student explain the cubes sagged since not all chairs were the same height, and the shorter chair backs made it less secure. 

Once they had used all the cubes, and could not make it any longer, we encouraged them to measure it. We gave them measuring tapes, and with some cooperation and teacher assistance, they discovered it was 703 cm long (not 703 km long as some proclaimed!!!😀)

Measuring gave one student the idea that he wanted to make his own measuring tape. He quickly went to work, cut a painting paper into strips and began putting on the numbers. He finally decided that writing these numbers was going to be a lot of work...he was going to take it home to complete at his leisure!

Madame Behnke came in to admire our creation, and posed the question"I wonder how many cubes you used?". This sent us on our next daunting adventure! With some prompting, the students realized that they could count the cubes to 10, then mark the ten as a tally mark, then we counted all the tally marks. 

We discovered that we had used 380 cubes in all!

What a simple, yet amazing learning experience that encompassed our entire morning and included many learners!