Measurement and the young student- 1512

Measuring marigolds might just be a great idea when introducing the concept of measurement to young students. I really like the idea of using non-standard units of measure so the marigold could be the ruler for that matter! But seriously,folks, I do agree that young students will grasp the concept of measuring much better if you begin with things they know. Have them use their feet or their hands to measure their desk or chair. In my observations I have seen teachers use things like ice-cream scoops to measure the height of the kids in the class, marking off each student on a wall chart made of a super stack of construction paper scoops. I liked that one a lot. The kids will all get it and will probably tell their parents for the next year how many scoops high they are.
Teaching measurement skills will work so well with estimation skills that I can already see a load of activities to try out...take a guess how many spaghetti noodles tall you are! Guess how many Ritz crackers are in a stack as high as your chair! Take a stab at how many juice boxes it will take to fill an aquarium! The best part would be actually carrying out these crazy stunts to see how close they came to the correct answer.

The idea is to get the making reference points for size, weight and volume before they begin to practice with standard units of measure. So having access to various containers to see how many of this fit into that will be important. They can also begin to compare their own measurement with that of other students and adults. It would be interesting to have the students estimate how tall older students might be in 5th grade, 8th grade and 12 grade and then go and actually measure a group of students to find out if they came close. I think I'm getting an overload of ideas for this topic and that, as Martha Stewart would say, "is a good thing." Yes, it is.

By the way, if you estimated that Martha is tall you'd have been right- she is in fact, 5'9" tall or you could estimate her at around 23 McDonald's french fries (which in turn I'm estimating at 3 inches...)

Once students are getting comfortable with standard units of measure like feet, yards, pounds (or grams, centimeters and liters if you are so inclined), you could use these estimating skills in other subjects as well. Make a treasure hunt for social studies and have them find things that measure certain amounts...like find an object that would have been on the Great Plains that would have weighed 2000 lbs or something that would have been a foot tall standing or half that walking...the possibilities are endless.

Can you guess which animal I was looking for in the questions above?  Thanks to all the references you've made over the years it should be easy to figure that the Buffalo is taller than 12 inches so it must have been the one that is around 2000 pounds.

Of course, I can't leave without giving you another video that should appeal to young students as they grapple with the concept of THE FOOT. Enjoy.