Raise your hand if you have ever run out of time to get to the measurement or geometry unit in your textbook. So, I have three recommendations for you if this is you.

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• 10 Instructional Shifts by Steven Leinwand
• Content Emphases by Achieve the Core

Do It Every Day – Don’t Wait Until The End Of The Year

Number one is to always be doing it. Don’t wait until the end of the year. The hard part is we wait until the end of the year and our textbooks are too big, we get behind, and we just don’t get to it. So find small times throughout your year to incorporate measurement and geometry. Because if every year each class isn’t getting to it, those kids, year after year after year, aren’t getting measurement and geometry. I want to encourage you to find small ways to implement measurement and geometry wherever you can throughout your year.

Make It A Part Of Your Daily Routine

Now, one of my big recommendations here is to, hopefully, help you develop a daily routine. Don’t just say I’m going to do it here or there, find something that you could have the kids do every single day. Because if we say, “Oh, I might do it here and here,” we forget, right? That’s why it doesn’t get done at the end of our textbooks because things happen. We get bogged down with other things. But, if you make it a point to have it be daily. So, find five minutes where you could do something around measurement and geometry, that adds up throughout the year.

So here are two recommendations for some kind of daily routine.

My first one is an idea I got from the book 10 Instructional Shifts by Steven Leinwand. One of the ideas was that kids need to have some repeated practice. If we aren’t bringing things up throughout the year, kids tend to forget it. We need to have some kind of review. So, his idea is called Mini-Math. And here’s a little picture of one from the book.

And, as you can see, they’re not all measurement and geometry, but there’s actually a reason to why each problem is there. So, here’s a little insight into what he talks about.

Every single day you should be doing a fact that students struggle with. You should have some kind of problem that talks about place value. You should have an estimation problem. You should have a problem that should be second nature for kids, something they should instantly know. You should have some kind of model drawing, get kids drawing about mathematics. And then the last one, he says kids need some kind of measurement problem every single day.

So, here’s a little example that I created for even if you’re with young kids.

And the same things apply.

That first one is a fact that students struggle with. Even in the young grades, kids need place value work, they need estimation, they have things that should become second nature to them. And, again, this is a great place to put in money stuff because, even in the young grades, we don’t have standards about money, but kids still need to have those ideas and be able to tell how much certain coins are worth. They need to draw models, and they need some kind of measurement. And I added in they need measurement and, or geometry every single day. If you’re doing some kind of review type tasks, make sure that you’re including something that is measurement and geometry related.

Now, the other thing that I would really encourage you to do on a daily basis is to get kids doing some kind of spatial reasoning task. Whether that’s puzzles, working with tangrams, working with pattern blocks and doing pattern block puzzles. Something that builds their spatial reasoning. A lot of measurement and geometry relies upon kids’ ability to manipulate shapes and see shapes within things. We want kids to be able to build that spatial reasoning.

So if you can have things out and give them time every single day to do some kind of activity that builds that spatial reasoning, the by-product will be their measurement and geometry knowledge will increase.

Find Ways To Connect Those Standards To The Number Standards

Now, the last thing I’m going to give you some advice on, my third recommendation is to take a look at these content emphases.

The content emphases is a document that was put out by Achieve the Core. There’s one for each grade level and it basically talks about how certain standards carry more weight. You’re not gonna spend as much time on geometry as you do in place value in first grade because place value in first grade is a huge, big, major deal, and geometry is a small part of that. Same thing with measurement, but there are standards that connect to those major standards.

So, on these documents, they have colors on them that help you notice which ones are your major, which ones are your supporting, and which ones are additional standards.

Now, those green ones, here’s an example from the fourth grade, but these green ones are the ones that are the major, that’s the big work at that grade level. The blue rectangle is ones that help support it. So, if you look at fourth grade, and they have this, again, for each grade, I’m just showing fourth as an example, but those blue ones in fourth grade are dealing with factors and multiples, which connects to multiplication.

If you go down it talks about solving problems where you’re converting measurements from larger and smaller units. That’s multiplication and division. When you’re representing and interpreting data, you’re looking a lot, in fourth grade, at how many times more did something happen? So, if you’re analyzing data, you’re looking at was it, did we double the amount of people who like pepperoni pizza versus cheese? Those kinds of situations.

But, guess what, they’re all revolving around those big ideas at fourth grade. The other cool part about this document is it shows the major work at certain grade bands. If you see in third through fifth grade, the major work is on multiplication and division, and fractions. As much as you can, be relating measurement stuff back to fraction work. If you’re doing data, there’s a lot of multiplication and division that can be done when you’re doing those things.

Find ways that you can incorporate measurement and geometry when you’re doing multiplication, division, same thing in the young grades, look at what you’re major work is and then look to see what measurement and geometry standards help support that, so that you can do them intertwined and not, again, wait until the end of the year. Find ways to implement it and integrate it throughout your year so that you don’t feel rushed at the end to try to get that part in. All right, I hope that this helped to build your math mind so you can go build those math minds of your students.

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