Hot Chocolate Measuring

Brrrrrrr!  These cold days have me wishing I was snuggled up by a fire drinking some hot coco!  My students, I do believe, would agree.  We can't have that fire in our classroom, but we can sure have the hot coco!  A few weeks ago, our math time turned to all things "chocolatey".  Hot chocolatey that is.  Let me explain. Part of being a first grader is learning to measure by expressing length in whole units. (CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.MD.A.2)  These units can be tiles, inches, pictures, cubes.....marshmallows, hot chocolate packets, straws.... you see where I am going here?  So I decided it would be great fun to use some of those more unusual things to measure with.  I started planning and one idea lead to the next and before my first graders knew it, we were up to our ears in marshmallows! YUM!
To begin the unit, students were all given different sizes of marshmallows.  Have you seen how many different shapes and sizes there are of marshmallows now?  We worked on ordering these marshmallows by length and comparing the marshmallows to a standard unit.  CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.1.MD.A.1  We got really good at expressing our thoughts in "length" words.  Words like longer, shorter, taller, wider, etc. became common vocabulary in our classroom.  This helps to understand the idea of comparing length rather than size.   Size words might be bigger, smaller, larger and so on.

Students practiced the rest of the week practicing their measuring skills with marshmallows.  They first got the hang of things by measuring objects on measuring mats and then quickly moved to measuring mugs, hot chocolate packets, school supplies and more.  We really had a fun week and learned so much with this unit.  If you would like to check it out for yourself, you can find it here!