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.