“Help! The dreaded Snuzzlewump has returned to my kingdom! He smashed Pim’s house! He trampled the King’s garden! And worse yet – he broke all of our
rulers! How will we measure now?”
- Princess Funer
We immediately sprang into action! First, we needed to learn more about this terrible creature, the Snuzzlewump.
We learned that the princess needed to learn how large three of the now-destroyed items in her kingdom were so that she could rebuild them. She needed to know how tall the pillars of her castle were, how wide the roof of Pim's house was, and how wide the roller skating rink was. Luckily for us, we had those exact things in our classroom: We just called them markers, post-it notes, and notebooks, however!
Our rulers, though, were broken. None of them started at 0! And that was one of our rules when measuring! This seemed tough...and like something that might take more than one day. Yesterday, we started to measure. It was hard! We were finding things like "32 cm for a post-it note" which we knew couldn't be right. But if it wasn't right, why was the end of the post-it note at the 32 mark?
Yesterday, we kept digging into this problem. We used a large-scale "ruler" (our number line) to measure objects and found that they didn't change in length whether we held then starting at 0 or starting at another number. A paper that was 9 units when held from 0 to 9 was also 9 units when it was held from 10 to 19! We kept working on this for a while and suddenly, it clicked! We could do this! We just had to find the number of spaces between the start and end numbers! We were just finding the difference between the two numbers! We were on a roll! Stay tuned as we continue our exploration into measurement.
