by Stefany Smith

Created on: June 22, 2010   Last Updated: June 23, 2010

Children of this age are naturally curious, have the desire to explore, and love to feel involved. This can cause a bit of stress in the classroom if you’re not prepared. However, if you can learn to use these natural tendencies to your advantage, teaching measurement skills will feel more like playing than working. Here are a few ideas and guidelines to get you started.

First, before you even begin there are two things you must remember when teaching kindergarten children. 1. They still reside within their bodies. The outside world is completely foreign to them. 2. Connections they can make with the outside world using their bodies provide the best approach when teaching new concepts. If you desire that your students will retain any of the lessons from your classroom, tying outside concepts to physical awareness to make connections is the key.

Second, when contemplating adding measurement skills to your curriculum, you need to keep in mind that this encompasses length and width, but also distance, weight, and volume. You don’t need to get down to the nitty-gritty with kindergartners. Your job is to simply lay the foundation upon which future teachers can build. As long as your students leave your classroom next spring with a firm grip on the concepts of all of these measurement skills, you have done your job well.

The following activities will introduce the concepts of: measuring length, width, and height; comparing objects using descriptive words; charting, comparing different units of measurement, comparing weights and volumes, and distances.

Hands and Feet

A child’s first discovery is usually their hands, shortly followed by their feet. For the first 4-6 years of their lives their hands and feet have been the tools by which they explored their world. It only seems obvious than that hands and feet should be their first tools of measurement. There are two ways you can do this. The first is using their hands and feet as measuring tools, placing them heel to fingertip/toe, along objects to measure them. The second, and perhaps the next step, is to trace their hands and feet on paper, then cut them out. You can then provide 5-10 cutouts of each set of hands and feet to use for comparing measurements of objects.

There are four activities that work well involving the hands and feet approach to discovering measurement.

Prepare a chart with rows of common objects found around the classroom, and two columns marked bigger, smaller. The children will

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