Let's cooking!

Have you ever thought about how fun is cooking with children? Cooking is a free-time activity that we can do at home or school if we have the suitable means. Children love cooking because it is a different activity in which they can discover and create. Furthermore, it can have several pedagogical purposes. In the field of nutrition, we can teach our students how is the process to cook the food that we eat and what are the nutrients and vitamins of each ingredient that we use. In this way, children will be aware of the importance of a healthy diet. But, what about Maths?

In the field of our subject, cooking has an essential role since it deals with lots of numbers, quantities and units of measurement. For this reason, in this post, we suggest an activity based on cooking following a recipe. We are going to prepare a sponge cake! This home-made cake is much healthier than any other processed baked goods that children usually eat, so it can be a great idea to take it for the afternoon snack.

The most important task for the students will be to prepare the ingredients. They will have to measure and weigh the different quantities. The ingredients that we need are:

The ingredients should be measured using different instruments. To weigh them, we can use a typical kitchen balance. For the liquids, there are different pans available to measure the capacity, though it can be interesting to use a meter jar because students can observe the units. There is also a possibility to measure the different ingredients using the yoghurt container as a unit of measurement. Moreover, if we want to make the activity more challenging, we can give the recipe to the children with the ingredients in different units of measurement (grams, kilos, etc.), so they will have to transform them into the same unit. 

Once all the ingredients have been mixed and we have the dough, it’s time to bake it in the oven. At this moment, our students will have to measure the time that it is necessary (35 minutes) and the temperature of the oven (180ºC).

Finally… we can taste our creation!

How do you feel today?

How do you feel today? This is a question that all teachers should ask in every class, no matter which subject is. After four years in the Primary Education degree, I can affirm that feelings are as important as any content that we want to teach our students. The teacher needs to know the emotions that his/her students feel to act according to that. If a child feels sad because he/she has any problem, it is better to address this problem first, because it can become a barrier to continue learning. From my view, it is more important that students know what emotions are they feeling and how to regulate them. For this reason, emotions have to be present in the Maths class.

However, can we measure our emotions? Apparently, we can think that emotions are no-measurable reactions, but two years ago, we discovered that we can count them. A teacher in the faculty taught us how to do it. In class, we can work with emotions in many ways. One of the most useful and significant dynamics for children is to associate one emotion with one colour. The book “The colour monster” (“El monstruo de colores”) is so popular because it is a powerful tool which has positive results.

The book establishes six main emotions associated with colours: love (pink), happiness (yellow), calm (green), anger (red), sadness (blue) and fear (black). The following activity that I’m going to suggest was carried out in the faculty with my class and the results were fantastic. First of all, we will ask our students for bringing one button of each one of these previous colours. In class, there will be six containers and each day, at the beginning of the class, all the students will have to put a button in one container, according to the feeling that they have. In this way, we can measure how the class is feeling each day and solve any kind of problem that it happens. The containers and the buttons inside are a visual graphic to represent and measure the emotions. They can also add more buttons depending on how strong the emotion that they feel is. This useful activity can give us a general idea about the mood of the group each day. 

If we can go further with this activity, we will express the results through other kinds of graphics to teach statistics to our students. We can use bar charts or sectors diagrams. For the oldest students, we can also use percentages to represent the data.

Here, there is a home-made video of how to do this activity, though we prefer using another kind of container, like a glass jar.

A measurable city walk

As we have seen in the previous posts, measurement is present in our daily life and measurable items surround us everywhere. We have been talking about different resources and activities that we can apply with our students inside the classroom but, what about outside? Can we practise in other places being inside the classroom? Of course!

Nowadays, the huge development of technological resources allows us to discover and visit several places without moving from our home or our school. This time, we are going to learn about measurement in the city. The main objective is that our students learn from significant activities that they can practise outside the classroom when they walk around the city so that it has a meaningful and real purpose.  

We can work with measurement in the city at all levels of Primary Education, though the teacher has to be able to adapt the contents to each level and group. As an introductory activity for the oldest students, those who are in the fifth and sixth course, we can work with distances in traffic signals. There are lots of traffic signals in the city and the roads which express distances and we can ask our students for observing and taking pictures of them during a week, for instance. Then, they can bring the photos to the classroom and we can debate with the whole group about their meaning and usefulness. In this way, we will not just teach Maths, but also transversal contents of civic rules and road safety education.

Another relevant aspect that we can find and study in our cities is the high of different buildings. It could be interesting for the students to know the high of their building. However, we can make the class more cultural because we also want to teach Social Sciences, so we will focus on historical monuments and buildings. Showing several pictures and comparisons of the buildings’ high, we can see the tendency to build higher modern buildings. In this way, the historical buildings that we consider “high” are now smaller because of this tendency of building skyscrapers in our cities. In the same activity, we can also compare historical monuments from different cities and know their highs. 

Furthermore, the most interesting and enjoying activity for our students could be to calculate distances in the city using maps. For this activity, we will use Google Maps and we can start calculating the distance that each student goes in his/her way to school every day. We will also use the mode “street view” if students want to recreate their path in a real way. So, this tool allows us to discover any city or place that we want with real images. In this first research, students can compare the distances that they go using different units of measurement -may be the distance of a student is in meters and another one who goes by car is in kilometres-. The program also estimates the time that it is usually spent using different means of transport (foot, bike, public transport, car, etc.). Once we have calculated our first distance between the home and the school, we can do the same between cities, countries or continents. The aim is that they explore, discover and learn differently, trying to connect Maths, Geography and History subjects.

Our own measuring instrument

We don’t really know the potentiality that our body has for doing things. One of them is the ability to measure using different parts of it. As we have seen in a previous post, in ancient times, people used parts of their bodies as tools of measurement because there weren’t other objects that could measure.

Nowadays, although we can use more accurate systems to measure, as the meter system, I think that measuring with our body could be an enjoyable and exciting activity for our children in order to introduce them in the basic measurement concepts. In this way, they will be active and learning by doing, which is the most significant activity that can be done to acquire any knowledge.

After watching this video, the activity that I suggest is quite simple, but also engaging. Each child will select the parts of the body that he or she wants to use to measure different objects (the foot, the cubit, the hand…). Then, to make the practice more individual, each student will also select ten class elements that he or she wants to measure with the selected parts. Once they have made such decisions, it’s time to free measure! They will collect the information that they get in their notebooks. 

However, it is important to make our children aware that this system is not really precise, because we don’t have all the same size. For instance, the length of a child’s arm is different from the arm of another classmate. For this reason, once they have finished measuring, we will compare the results between children who measure the same object or space. In this way, they will realize that the length of one side of the classroom can be twenty steps or eighteen, depending on the person who has measured it. Therefore, we can say that our body is the most personal instrument to measure! Let’s try it!

Comparing and estimating in class

In this post, we are going to address something which is essential to teach our youngest children, those who are going to learn how to measure soon. Before that, students of the first and second courses of Primary Education should learn to compare and estimate objects and lengths. This will help them in the future to understand and operate with measurement units.

First of all, our students need to acquire comparison concepts: what is longer, shorter, smaller, higher, etc. The best way to do it is through games because they create an enjoyable atmosphere in class and learning occurs without realising. Some simple and feasible games can be carried out in class just taking a wide variety of school materials. Divided into different groups, children will choose the object that the teacher asks for. For instance, the biggest rubber or the longest rule. It can be a kind of competition to make the game more exciting. In this way, our students will learn to distinguish between objects making different comparisons. Once it has been achieved, we can start to order all the objects by its size building several series. The following video can be used to introduce the children to this topic.

Once our learners can compare, it’s time to estimate sizes and measures. It can be done also with the same planning as in the first game. However, in this case, we will ask our groups of learners for different aspects and then, we will check them. If our learners are very young, we will start by asking them if something fits in a place. For example, if a chair fits into a student’s bag. If they have more knowledge about measurement, we can ask them for the length of several objects present in the classroom. For instance, the length of their desks or the window. The children can make the estimations in their minds using the metric system or the system that they want (if they can estimate using a pencil or another specific object). The aim is that their brains start to imagine and think about the issue of measurement. In this way, we are familiarizing their eyes with the concepts of space, distance and length. Finally, we can add this video to our explanation and games to help our learners to compare and estimate.

How to measure at school?

As we already know from our own experiences, the teaching of Mathematics and measurement concepts are often difficult issues to deal with, especially because our learners see them as boring and tedious. This is why, as teachers, we should make the most of our own resources and places to design useful and enjoyable materials that help our students to acquire the main foundations of the subject through practical and fun activities. In this post, I’m going to give you some ideas to take advantage of the current materials and transform them into a measurement resource.

-Table-meter

This resource is quite simple, but also useful. It consists of fixing a ruler in centimetres in each desk of our classroom. In this way, our students can measure all the objects they want without standing up from their chairs. Sometimes, they need to measure an object which is bigger than the current rule that they usually have in their pencil-cases (20-30 cm). Using the table as a meter allows them to measure bigger items. It could be really useful to introduce our learners in the measurement concepts and the metric system.

-Measurement stairs

In this case, we can use the school stairs to help our learners to acquire the metric unit changes. Normally, they get confused with this aspect because they don’t know when they have to multiply or divide. For this reason, they used to be taught with a stair that contains the operations and the unit of measurement involved. However, it doesn’t have the same impact in a paper that in a real stair, which is more meaningful for our children because they can up and down steps to see it. In this way, they use a manipulative resource that they are accustomed to using, but with an educative purpose.

-Angles’ door

Another issue which is usually difficult for children is the measurement of angles. It is really hard for them to know how the protractor works and how to use it. For this reason, we can start by using the class door to draw the different positions of the angles and help them to understand its function in a practical way.

-Fruitmeter and reader circuit

These two resources were used in the class where I did my last internships. The first one is a kind of graphic which is destined to gather information about the times that students bring fruit for breakfast. When it happens, each child coloured a square. This resource is really useful to foster healthy habits between students, but also to know how the graphics works, to compare results, etc. I’m sorry about the picture but I haven’t found the one that I took in my class.

The second resource is a reader circuit, which is used to gather information about the number of words that each child is able to read in a minute. In this case, each student is represented by a car coloured by him/her. This is another kind of enjoyable graphic through which they can see their position and compare it with the other classmates. It is also useful to know how to put a specific number of words between two quantities.

What is MEASUREMENT?

First of all, before starting with other aspects or resources, we need to know what is the measurement, which can be measurable and some basic foundations about the topic. In this first post we are going to deal with these issues because we can’t address something if we don’t know it before, don’t you think?

According to the Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, to measure is the action of “comparing a quantity with its respective unit to discover how many times the second one is included in the first one”. This definition is only one of hundreds of them and we will take it just like a reference because our aim is the practical application of the basic concept.

However, what is the origin of measuring? Since ancient times, measuring has been a vital necessity for men and women. The first units of measurement appear with the first tools invented by human beings. The primitive societies needed rudimentary measures for several tasks: the construction of shelters, the dressmaking of clothes or just to be able to cook food to survive.

The most ancient systems of weight and measurement that we know were created in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indian Valley. There were also references mentioned in the Bible. Many measurement systems were based on the use of the different parts of the human body and several tools found in each natural environment. Using the following video, we can teach our students how to measure using parts of their bodies. It can be a useful and enjoyable way to introduce them to the world of measurement.

Nowadays, we use the International System of Units (ISU) or (SI) in Spanish, which is the current decimal metrical system that establishes the units and magnitudes to be used internationally. This system consists of seven magnitudes used and their respective units of measurement: length, mass, time, electric intensity, temperature, light intensity and quantity of substance. Although this is an international system, there are some countries which have their measurement systems and can use both of them, as in England. I have found really interesting the following video to make children aware of the importance of using an international measurement system. The examples of measuring objects with pencils of different sizes can be carried out also in class with our students to see the differences.

The most important thing is that our learners can practically apply this theory using the proper units of measurement in their daily life. For this reason, we must teach it through meaningful situations that happens constantly. Finally, I suggest this video to sum up this introductory lesson about measurement for our students. It also includes a fun quiz at the end to check the acquisition of the previous contents. It uses the English system. 

Welcome to "Measuring our world"!

Hello everyone!

My name is Adrián Ariza and I’m twenty-two years old. I’m a student of the fourth year of Primary Education Degree in a bilingual modality at the University of Málaga. I’ve created this blog as a new didactic space to share different ideas, activities and resources related to didactics of measurement. My objective is to see Maths as an enjoyable subject that allows children to learn, but also to play, discover and have fun at the same time.

In the following entries, we will see several aspects of measurement which has drawn our attention during the course, such as didactic tools, curiosities, etc. regarding their didactic application for our lessons.

Measurement is more than measuring a distance or an object. Almost all the aspects of our life can be measured, including feelings! For this reason, we consider that this subject is essential for children, but also for teachers, who need to know how to introduce the different aspects to the learners. “Measuring our world” is a reference to the presence of measurement in any part of our life and, consequently, our world. We are surrounded by measurable items and maybe we are not aware of it. So, let’s have a look!

I hope you find my blog interesting and useful to teach measurement dynamically and attractively. Don’t forget to share your comments or ideas!

Thanks a lot!