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!