Recently I was told about an elementary student who was working on an elementary math problem at home. The student was supposed to measure the dimensions of his room in an effort to determine the perimeter and area. The student did not have any of the conventional tools one would use to measure a bedroom.
However, the student elected to use what he had and make sense of the resources in his home in order to persever in solving the problem. First the student used yarn, stretching it out across length of the room, and then cutting the strand. The student then repeated the process for the width of the room. When he was done the student placed both pieces of yarn on the floor.
He then carefully walked, one foot in front of the other, the paces of the first strand of yarn. He wrote down how many paces and then repeated the process for the second strand. When he was done he threw the pieces of yarn away before heading outside.
Outside he took with him a blank piece of paper and put it down on the ground. He walked around for a while and then stepped on the piece of paper. This left him with a shoeprint of the same shoe which he had just worn to measure the dimensions of his room. The student put his name on the top along with the steps he had recorded earlier.
The next day when he went to school he asked his teacher to borrow a ruler. He used the ruler to measure the shoeprint and then began to multiply the length of his shoe by the number of steps for each strand he had previously recorded. The student eventually calculated all of the dimensions (both perimeter and area) of his room after finally having a numerical measurement. However, he would not have been capable of completing his assignment had he not taken the initiative and creativity to use the tools presented to him effectively. He strategically thought out how to solve the problem, persevered in doing so, and used the tools he had to work with appropriately.
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