I'm always surprised how little experience my kids have using rulers to actually measure instead of drawing straight lines. We start with the standard speech about how rulers are tools for measurement and not little helicopter blades for your pencil, not little smacky weapons, not used to make annoying tapping sounds that drive your teacher crazy, etc...
After we're good with all that, we start to measure. We measure everything. We talk about inches and feet and they always pick that up pretty quick. To help them determine when to measure in inches and when to use feet, we play the Inch or Foot measuring game.
I like to group the kids in threes. One reads the cards and checks the answer while the other two play. Once a winner is chosen, they play again and the caller can play. I found that I have a lot of games that call for the kids to have 10 of one color cube. I put them in these clear pencil cases from Dollar Tree so the kids can just grab one and not spend a ton of time counting out ten of one color from the big box.
Click on the picture below to download the game for freezies.
Then it's time for my favorite math project:
I've blogged about this one before. Check out this post for specific directions. You can get the patterns and printables in that post, or just click here.
We used our yard to measure alllll kinds of stuff. I didn't like what was in the book, so I made a little sheet for us to record some long things. We measured the length and width of the room:
We measured the carpet:
The door frame:
Their teacher:
Then we took on the task of measuring the entire hallway! We got our friends from next door to help us. Can you even handle the cuteness of these kids?? Those two girls at the front of the line are like that all.day.long. Just silly and excited and adorable...
At the end of the hallway, we had a great chance to estimate how many more feet it would take to fill the blank space. They were pretty much spot on!
We recorded all of our measurements on this little sheet I whipped up.
When we were using our diy yardsticks to measure, we only listed the yard measurements. Then when we went back to our seats we tried to figure out the equivalent measurements. They did a great job with the smaller numbers. They got the concept and could easily figure that 2 yards equal 6 feet which equals 72 inches. Some of my higher kids really enjoyed the challenge of figuring out the rest of them, but after a few minutes we pulled up the online calculator to finish them together. Click here to download the sheet we used to record our measurements.
I have a couple of other things you might like for measurement. You can see more by clicking on the images below:
TGIF, my friends! T.G.I.F.
Hi Denise! I love these activities! However, I am in Canada. Any chance one day you would make a Canadian version with cm and m? I noticed one of the ruler borders on one of the sheets had inches and cm :) Thanks for considering this :) I know it takes a lot of time.
ReplyDeleteHi Maureen! We're actually moving on to the metric system next, so hopefully in the next few days I'll have something ready to share :)
ReplyDeleteWe are just getting ready to start measurement, so your freebie came at the perfect time for me! It looks absolutely adorable & exciting! Thanks so much!!! :)
ReplyDeleteMallory
Sprinkles for the Teacher
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ReplyDeleteI love teaching measurement! I notice your kids don't have desks, but tables. I like it!
ReplyDeleteKirsten
So fun!!
ReplyDeleteAllison
Stuckey in Second