Learning About Measurement

We have been learning a lot about measurement during this semester.  Whether it's been measuring time, length, or weight, we've done a lot of fun things to help us learn.

One of the first things we did was to learn about standard units of length.  How do we know how long something is?  We've discussed longer and shorter in the past, but we were ready to use some units.
We used our feet to measure things since we had heard the people measure in feet.  We traced our own feet on paper, cut the feet out, and looked for things around the classroom that were about the same size as our foot.

Then we put our feet together to measure longer objects:

We read the story How Big is a Foot and we learned that the king had a problem.  He wanted a bed that was 6 feet by 3 feet.  When the carpenter brought the finished bed to the king, it was too small. How did that happen? The king and the carpenter had different sized feet!  Here we are modeling the king's bed and the carpenter's bed.

Once we realized that a foot should be the same size for everyone, we practiced using rules with inches for our standard unit.  We measured something with rules and then measured the object with our paper feet.  What a difference!

Working on length isn't the only measurement we've tackled.  We've worked on measuring time, measuring weight, and measuring temperature.  With measuring time, we made a thinking map to show all of the different ways we could measure time.  

We sequenced activities from a typical day in kindergarten to help us understand time as well.  We measure time daily with our calendar activities.  With temperature, we graph daily weather, and we know that a thermometer is a tool we use to measure time. We're ready for success with measurement!