Snow snake is a winter game of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and other Native nations of the Great Lakes and Northeast, and communities still hold snow snake games every winter. A long snake is a carved, polished stick of hardwood such as hickory, about 6 to 9 feet long and less than an inch thick. Players slide the snakes along a groove in a bank of packed snow, and the snake that travels farthest wins. The snakes on these pages are small models, and the throws and track lengths are made up for the problems.
Five pages of 2nd and 3rd grade measurement from snow snake. Page 1 measures four model snakes with an inch ruler printed at real size, then compares them. Page 2 does the same in centimeters. Page 3 reads where five snakes stopped on a number line of a snow track, marked every 10 feet. Page 4 has six distance and length stories within 1,000. Page 5 makes a line plot of fourteen model snakes and answers three questions. The first problem on each of the first four pages is a worked example.
Print at 100% (actual size) so the rulers measure true inches and centimeters, and check one snake with a real ruler. Before page 3, talk about how a snow snake track is built: snow banked up, and a log dragged along it to make a smooth groove.
Measure some long things at home in feet, like a bed or a hallway, and talk about how a real snow snake is about as long as a bed.
This pack supports the following Common Core State Standards for Mathematics:
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Measurement from snow snake, a winter game of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and other Native nations, in which a polished wooden stick is slid down a long track of snow. Students measure model snakes in inches and centimeters, read throws on a number line, add and subtract distances and make a line plot.
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