Measurement: Big & Small

After working on height and length, I then introduced them to the vocabulary words BIG and SMALL.  We discussed in great length how these two words can be used to DESCRIBE sizes in many ways.  Something "big" can either be tall, long, or both.  Something "small" can be short, or short.  Hey - we use the same word in measuring both length & height!  If the kids did not realize it already, which most often they did, we took the opportunity to discuss that many words can have more than one meaning.

Literature to support this unit:

We put on our science caps again and talked about big and small animals, and when time allowed got to look thru books at animals.  I was only teaching math for these lessons, but since I started out teaching science I have never been to fully take that cap off.

The younger classes were given a kinesthetic activity as review.  I held up an item, and they had to "go find" something in the classroom that was either bigger, smaller, taller, longer, or shorter than what I was holding.  They would bring me the item (or if it was not removable like a poster or display I would go to them) and we "measured" or "compared" the items to see if we were correct.  I always took this opportunity to verbalize that I was "lining up" the two items and why we did that.

Kathy