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Measuring Up


 This week our neighborhood had ‘Touch a Truck Day’, which is a time when all city vehicles (police, army, fire, ambulances, ice cream trucks, etc.) are on display for the kids to climb in and pretend to drive.  The kids love going and sitting in the ambulances and the police cars.  This year there was a real fireman hose and the kids got to put out a pretend fire with the real hose – clearly the highlight this year for them.  For me the best part was the mobile police headquarter van, which was straight out of any heist movie you’ve ever seen.  Super cool.  Anyway, at the event the girls were given, among other things, rulers and they were dying to use them.

So after they got up from their naps on touch a truck day I set out to teach them how to use a ruler.  This is a great and fun way to practice visual number recognition (versus rote counting) and addition.  I point out each number from 1 to 12 along the ruler to the kids.  Then I tell them that those numbers tell you how big something is.  You can measure the length (how long it is), the width (how wide it is), and the depth (how deep or fat it is).  I elaborated.  When you put your ruler on something, you line up the back of the object with the back of the ruler and whatever number the object stops on is how big it is.  Briana was ready to go with her wooden ruler.  Abigail was happy to shake her plastic ruler around and follow Briana.

Briana gets her “field journal”, (from Go, Diego, Go!) and her ruler and we go around the house measuring things and writing how many inches long they were in our journal.  We skipped width and depth in pursuit of quantity of objects measured and catalogued.



The best thing about this was that Briana got lots of practice looking at numbers and saying what number that is.  She also got to practice spelling, as I spelled out d-o-o-r-k-n-o-b and wrote it in her journal. She wrote the number for the length down followed by i-n-c-h-e-s, which she wrote out.


And don’t count out Abigail.  Even though at just 2 years old she doesn’t have the motor skills or number recognition of her 3-year-old big sister, she did her best to copy and I think that it was soaking at her level because she kept repeating the numbers and trying to spell out the words with us.  For some reason to Abigail, “A-L spells” anything she wants to spell.  I guess because I spell out Abigail for her often and she catches the A and the L.



At some point Briana decided that we should measure her.  So, why not.  This is where we worked on our addition.  Briana is actually starting to understand the principles of addition…or at least pattern recognition, not sure which.  If you say “1 + 1 = 2.  1 + 2 = 3.  1 + 3 =” she’ll say 4.  I found this out while she was watching Team Umizoomi, a math based cartoon for toddlers, which is currently both girls top pick when they get to watch tv.


We traced her onto the paper and then measured each part of her body.  Since the ruler only goes to 12 inches, for her legs and other parts that we’re longer than 12 inches we had to add 12 + whatever by counting past 12 for that many fingers.

Can you read that?  "Legs = 12 + 3 = 15 inches" and "Foot= 5 inches"

More measurements

Abby couldn’t sit still to be traced.  She kept giggling and running off.  I think she’s too ticklish.

Briana didn’t like having her person undressed so she told me exactly the dress to draw the outline of – “a long dress with strappy sleeves, that has a ruffly bottom but it’s straight with no flare”  We colored it together.  Poor Abby spilled her juice on it before I grabbed the camera and faced the wrath of a furious Briana.


Due to the injustice of having her fashion creation wrecked, Briana insisted that we measure her again the next day and she created a new dress all by herself – an orange ombre (“light orange on the top and darker orange on the bottom) sleeveless tutu” dress.


Here I am trying to teach her to love math and she turns it into fashion.  If this child doesn’t become a fashion designer one day, I’m going to be floored.  If you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she still says “a chemical engineer just like Mommy”, but either way it’s my job to make sure she knows her math so she can measure up.  J

<3 Pedigreed Housewife

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 29, 2011 at 3:29 PM

    Great lesson; lots of skills covered.

    ReplyDelete

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