“I caught a fish t—h—i—s big!”
Our guest blogger, Joanne Arcand, is stepping up to help us with this week’s summer series, which focuses on the foundation skills kids need for early elementary learning, with measurement.
By Joanne Arcand
It’s an old joke, I know, but I think my sons have inherited their skills in measurement not from their dad the carpenter, or their mom the scientist, but from their Grandad and his fish stories. As any mom who gives the “two more minutes” warning to their kids at the playground can tell you, measurement can stretch or shrink so that ten more minutes can seem like an hour or a one inch growth spurt can seem like the kid has grown a foot overnight.
When the kids were small, time for them was measured in Hi-5 episodes (thankfully for us, they never got onto the Wiggles). Telling them the drive to their Auntie’s house is an hour meant nothing to them, but tell them that it’s three Hi-5 shows and they understood. A good measurement system has to have a consistent reference point, but this point can be anything.
Four ways to play with measurement
- See how you measure up: Horses used to be measured by how many hands high they were, you could be measured that way too! Lie down on a hard surface and use chalk to make an outline of yourself. Use tinted soap to make a line of handprints to find out exactly how many hands tall you are.
- Let your body have a part in it: There’s an old Sesame Street song that goes “Stretch your arms to the side. From fingertip to fingertip, it’s almost a meter”. Which body parts could be reference points for you? Is your thumb joint exactly an inch long? Is your baby fingernail a ½ inch wide? Is your foot actually a foot long?
- It’s all in the game: The boys love those little measuring tapes at IKEA. They run around trying to find the biggest chairs, or the distance between the steps on a ladder. Have a contest to see who can find something exactly two feet wide, or who can close their eyes for exactly three minutes without counting. Or try my personal favorite: who can squirt the highest whipped cream swirl that still supports a cherry on top.
- Measure the big things: How tall is that apartment building? How fat is that elephant? Use photographs of your child beside some really big trees (or elephants) and use the computer to figure out the height of the object in “Felicias”, or use Felicia’s actual height and bring multiplication skills into the mix. Bigger kids can look at the shadow and see if they can figure out how to use it to estimate height.
I’m not saying we measure things all day, but I had two six year olds running through the house with measuring tapes for almost two hours yesterday guessing how big things were and then measuring for themselves. It brought joy to my little math teacher heart-which helped bring me patience to break up the Power-Rangers-Samurai-duel that broke out two hours later. Happy measuring!
Joanne Arcand is trying to juggle her role as a math teacher with her other life as mom of twin boys. She lives in Oakville, Ontario.
