Measurement main lesson block

Back in January and February we did a math block on measurement.  We covered time, linear measurement, weight, volume, etc.  It was so long ago that I'm not going to go into detail about everything we did, but I thought I'd highlight a few projects.

 This was our winter nature table.  The kids painted the pinecones with white paint to make snow-covered "trees".  The little blue doll in the left is Sariah's doll, and we used it in telling the Russian fairy tale of The Snowmaiden.

I'm not sure why I'm putting this picture in, because the project was kind of an epic fail.  This was our attempt to make a water clock.  The idea is that you put a hole in the bottom of the cup, then pour water through it for 1 minute (keeping watch with a kitchen timer).  Then you mark on the side of the jar below what the water level was.  You also make marks at the same interval all the way up the side of the jar.  Then you can tell time by pouring water and watching how fast it drains into the jar.  The problem was that the water wouldn't drain evenly through the cup.  Maybe it was because the cup was too flimsy, or that our hole wasn't the right size... but the water would sit and sit and sit and then all of a sudden come all at once through the whole.  There was no consistency.  But this did generate some good discussion about how even real, well-made water clocks probably weren't very accurate at telling time.

We wanted to make a sundial, or at least to go out and measure our shadows every day at various times, but wouldn't you know it, the week we discussed time happened the be the one week of the entire winter that it was cloudy and snowy every single day!

Now this was a fun project--making a real wooden ruler using lengths of flat doweling and a wood-burning tool!

Since the overall "theme" of this block was Noah and the ark and other Old Testament studies, we made cheese the old-fashioned way by squeezing it through cheesecloth.

 Dallin's favorite project was making Noah's Ark out of craft sticks.  We also modelled some of the animals out of beeswax.  During our week on linear measurement, we went outside and figured out just how long the ark had been.  We used biblical measurements (the cubit) and then converted them to feet and yards.  The ark was exactly as long as our block!  We also got some good multiplication practice when we tried to figure out how many animals were on the ark.  We used the idea from Melisa Nielsen's A Journey Through Waldorf Math to note which animals were clean and unclean, and how many animals of each type were taken onto the ark.   (Seven each of the clean animals, also seven each of fowls.)  I had Dallin make a list of all the animals we could think of, then we wrote them down under the categories of clean and unclean, birds, etcs.  Then we multiplied and added to get the total number.  We came up with 240+ and we know that was an extremely low estimate.
 

This is a picture of Dallin testing out a balance scale we made from plastic buckets and a broom handle.