Story:

Suggested manipulatives: Beginning measurement and place value tasks can start with Unifix cubes, multilinks or any single units that have the same length. As skills are developed, students can use base ten blocks to measure the length (one rod with a value of ten that has easy to read units) and for the students ready for more of a challenge, use Cuisenaire rods for measurement and counting. The video shows student using cuisenaire centimeter sticks to facilitate counting larger numbers.

Prep time: Adapting the Math Vitamin wording to fit your specific story, putting the manipulative out in the room, creating the string sections and copying the student documentation forms will take about 15-20 minutes. Set up is always more fun and shorter on time if you do this activity with a colleague.

Classroom time: Asking children to do their best work for each Math Vitamin assumes that some children will need a longer time than others. Ideally you want to offer a block of time for Math Vitamin projects and have another task available (writing, free exploration, etc.) for those students who finish work prior to their peers. For this project allow 20-45 minutes for students to work through all the steps.

How to individualize/stretch: For this Math Vitamin, the easiest way to remediate or offer stretches is to adapt the length of the string the student is using to measure as well as giving them a manipulative to work with that provides the ideal stretch for their current level of understanding.