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Children's Learning Progression
Young learners are encouraged to engage with and progress at their own pace using the resources outlined throughout this site. This will assist in empowering a sense of autonomy and confidence, to promote intrinsic motivation towards future mathematical learning (Russo et al., 2020).
Stage 1: Emerging
Emerging skills of volumetric thinking will be strongly tied to informal explorations of capacity within the context of their everyday lives. Young learners will still be developing basic counting and place value skills and as such, it will be inappropriate to use more formal units of measurement.
Initial focus should be placed on descriptive language, identifying pairs of familiar objects as ‘holding more, less, or the same amount’ as one another. As students progress, they will learn how to compare and order the capacity of multiple objects with uniform informal units of measurement. Conceptual understanding will be enhanced as students learn about principles of uniformity - for example, how capacity can only be compared through the use of cups of sand, rice or water from the same size cup.
Stage 2: Developing
Building upon the skills learnt in the Emerging phase. students will now begin to learn about using similar forms of measurement language to compare different volumes and capacities. For example, cups and spoons , handfuls and scoops
Students will now learn to identify and compare which shapes and objects would hold the most capacity. Including similar objects and irregular objects
During this phase students will begin to be introduced to more formal units of measurement, for example, litres and grams. Although they will not need to use these measurements, during instructions they can be introduced to start to be recognised
The Developing phase still utilises hands on learning for volume and capacity. This includes filling containers with water or sand and estimating how much a specific container can hold
Stage 3: Consolidation
In this development phase, children have already strengthened their mathematics understanding of measuring, describing and comparing objects that they observe in everyday life.
Young learners will now build their knowledge of measuring liquid and having the competence to recognise and use two common metric units, millilitres and litres. For example, students will learn how to read calibrated marks on measuring devices. They can also identify common objects that have a capacity of about 1 litre.
Here, children will also learn how to estimate liquid volume, when fluid objects end up on the un-numbered calibrations.
Super Skills - The 21st Century Learner
It is the hope that each of the resources and activities provided will seek to stimulate, engage and teach children the foundations of volumetric thinking within the broader strand of measurement and geometry.
Additionally, they will seek to foster higher-level skills for the 21st century. Often referred to as the 4Cs Super Skills - these are integral for children who will be taking part and existing within an increasingly digitised economy (Kivunja, 2015):
Critical Thinking: to solve unfamiliar problems in different ways
Communication: to understand and articulate ideas and solutions.
Collaboration: to work effectively and collaboratively with others.
Creating and Innovation: to create and exploit new ideas
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