Today we measured Nathan. We wondered what to measure him with. Aidan suggested cubes, Angus suggested books, Azi Hedeleen and Leander thought wooden pegs would be good. Leona volunteered to do the measuring. She chose red pencils. Nathan lay down and Leona laid the pencils out in a line. Jaiden pointed out that the pencils didn’t start at the bottom of Nathan’s feet. Leona corrected this and carefully placed the pencils in a line to the top of Nathan’s head. However Scarlett noticed the pencils were not touching, “so there is gaps that didn’t get measured“. Leona made sure the pencils we all touching. Once everyone was satisfied, we all counted the pencils. 14. “That means Nathan is 14.” said Aiden. “Yeah” agreed Jaiden. “Not 14 like his old, but 14 high.”

Shoei wanted to have a turn. There were only two red pencils left, so he decided to measure Nathan using orange pencils. Nathan was 8 orange pencils long. Now we had a problem- was Nathan 14 or 8?

Lovisa decided to solve the problem by measuring Nathan one last time. She got the yellow pencils and carefully laid them out. Oh oh! Nathan was 11 yellow pencils!

Jaiden noticed that the pencils were different lengths; red pencils were the shortest, the yellow pencils were the next longest and the orange pencils were the longest of all. (We had an interesting conversation about why that might be. A few children figured out that the red pencils must get used more and therefore concluded that red must be most people’s favorite color – a lovely authentic survey and data collection and graphing opportunity that I let go (for now) as I wanted to focus on the measuring.)

I asked the children what answer we should tweet to KinderPals. Some children thought we should tweet all answers. Others thought we should choose the biggest answer. One person thought we should tweet the yellow answer as yellow was her favorite color. After much discussion, the children reached a consensus that we should tweet all three answers and explain that one was short, one was a little bit long and one was the longest. Scarlett suggested that we needed to mention “one what? They need to know what the thing is, like a pencil“. She was out-voted. I decided not to interfere at this stage, but to wait and see how the inquiry unfolds; finding out for oneself is a much more powerful learning experience than being told.

The KC children are delighted with their work. I am wondering what KinderPals will make of this information. I look forward to seeing how KinderPals respond and where this inquiry will go next.