If you’re looking for educational Christmas activities for KS1, use this festive measurements lesson plan to help pupils understand how size relates to quantity…
Measures are an area of maths that some people love and most pupils hate. We learn numbers as quantities of objects, parts of a sequence and as ways of working out number problems. However, thinking of them as a size can be a difficult leap.
Using a ruler is a (relatively) simple process but reading a size from a scale has no real connection to a sense of quantity.
This Christmas activity for KS1 looks at how we can use objects to make measurements and help children develop an understanding of how size relates to quantity.
Learning objectives
- Measure using non-standard units
- Create a ruler based on any object
- Measure using body-based units of measurement
- Use teamwork and problem solving to create giant shapes without a ruler
Starter activity
Measure a range of objects in centimetres and record the results before posing the question: ‘Why is a centimetre a centimetre, and not any larger or smaller?’.
We know that there are 100 centimetres in a metre and a metre was originally defined in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the north pole.
It probably wasn’t that accurate a measurement in the beginning, but a much more reliable reference has since been agreed.
Talk about centimetres being something that people invented and that they could really be any size. What if we measured in conkers or mini snowmen instead?
Martin Saunders is a primary school teacher and co-founder of EdShed. Browse more snow day resources and Christmas activities.
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