CREATE
MAKE/DO
Choose from the activities below
Length
Create your own measuring tool
Draw around your hand several times and cut out the hand shapes.
Use your hand shapes to measure different objects in your house or garden e.g the height of a chair, the length of your scooter, the width of a door. You could even use your hand shapes to measure and compare the heights of different members of your family!
You could draw around your foot instead of your hand to create a different measuring tool. Do you think you would need more, less or the same number of feet as hands to measure your height?
Weight
Make your own simple balance scales
Watch the video to see how to make a super simple balance scale. You can of course adapt this using your own ideas.
Use your balance scale to compare the weights of different objects and discuss this using the language of weight.
Questions to consider;
Which object is heavier?
Which object is lighter?
Are they the same weight?
What happens to the side that is heavier?
What happens to the side that is lighter?
The next time your child is on a see-saw, see if they can work out who is heavier and who is lighter!
Area
Find the area of different surfaces
Area is a measure of the size of a surface.
Use the cut out hand shapes from the Length activity to cover the surface of different objects e.g a table top, and work out it's area.
Encourage your child to choose different objects to be the non-standard units of measure, e.g cubes, toy cars, and see how many of them they need to cover different surfaces.
Volume/Capacity
Volume is a measure of the amount of space taken up by an object.
Collect a variety of different containers e.g jars, jugs, cups, pots, bottles and choose something to fill them with e.g water, sand, earth, stones etc.
Which container needs the most water (sand or stones etc) before it is full?
Which container needs the least water etc before it is full?
Can you put the containers into order of largest to smallest volume?
