LLL: Measurements

The Theme of the Week for Laugh, Learn, Love is Measurements. This sparked some good conversations, especially in the kitchen. It's amazing how just thinking about a certain thing helps me to bring it up more often in our daily experiences. We also had a planned activity focusing on measuring length or height. We took photos, but they were terrible (bad lighting ion a rainy morning), so you have to use your imagination.

Materials: Measuring tape, scissors, string/yarn/ribbon. You will also need several of some other items--we used straws and dominoes.

Using the string we cut a length equal to A.'s hight, then mine, than my husbands. So we had three strings, all different lengths. We taped them to the floor for some comparisons, first to each other. "Oh look, my string is longer than yours, but daddy's string is the longest of all." etc.

Next we brought out the measuring tape and measured and recorded each one in inches. Then we lined up other objects to see how many it took to reach the end of each person's string. "A. is 18 1/2 dominoes tall, but only 6 straws tall." etc.

After this I taped the strings to an empty wall with papers giving our recorded measurements inches, dominoes, and straws.

We have guest arriving today, so we will ask them to participate as well. We'll measure their height and put the strings on the wall next to ours to get even more smaller/taller examples.

I also taped a few things (pencil, spoon, toothbrush) to a paper and helped A. use a ruler to measure and record how long they were. On another day I found a page in his workbook that had 4 clown pictures, all different heights. The instructions said to use a coin to measure how tall each of them are. That turned out to be a fun variation too. I figure it can easily be repeated with other pictures.