Student Work #2

In my 1st grade classroom, have just finished a math exploration involving weight and measurements.  In the photo, two girls are working as partners to see what objects balance each other out on a scale.  In this portion of the exploration, students were given one object (on a worksheet) and were to then find out what and how many of a different object it took to balance the scale.  The students doing this activity were given two worksheets, one telling them what objects to use, and one that was left blank for them to explore other objects.

To complete the first worksheet, the students, who were working in partners, had to read and find out what object they were told to start off with.  In the photo, this object was a cube.  The partners who were working on this scale decided to start with 4 cubes (when this photo was being taken, they were deciding what to balance it with).  At this time during the activity, the students were not told what to use to balance the cubes, so the girls had to think about what would balance.  They were not given a specific model in which to do this, so they had to decide what they thought would work based on previous experiences. 

Overall, a lot of what the students did was "guess and check".  They would take an object from the bag and place it on the opposite side of the scale, and continue doing this until something worked.  Though this is true, after a few trial runs, I did observe them then saying, "No, that will be too heavy because the highlighter was too heavy and this is bigger", which led me to believe that they were beginning to understand that the activity was more than just placing objects onto a scale and seeing what happens.  I liked that they did this because I could see that they were actually learning about the specific weight of objects in comparison to others and understanding the point of the exploration.
 
In this example, the mathematical objective was to have students determine which objects would balance each other out on a scale.  Based on the 1st grade skills I have observed in the classroom thus far, I anticipated that the students would be able to know that certain objects were heavier than others, but that it would be hard for them to compare the weights of objects in comparison to different objects.  This is how the activity seemed to go at first, but I was surprised to see the girls quickly figure out that certain objects wouldn't balance others based on what they saw happen in earlier trials of balancing.  I think that this tells me that these students currently understand that specific objects can weigh more or less that other objects and that differing amounts of certain objects can balance different objects on a scale.

If I were to encourage these students to move their thinking forward, I would have these girls go one step further and ask them to explain why certain objects balance with others and why some do not work (given the materials they had).  I would ask them to go further than saying "because one is heavier" and ask them about the amount of certain objects they used and why, for example using more cubes to balance a highlighter would work.  These questions would allow the students to understand the "why" question behind objects balancing and they would be able to actually learn the material instead of just focusing on trying different objects until the scale was balanced without thinking about it.