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.
