Note: This activity is follow up for https://www.eshikshachaupal.com/class_activity/measurement-length-vocabulary-introduction/ which I had posted earlier.
Step1: Begin the class revising what we did in the last class the concept of long and short (लम्ब्बा या नाटा) and tell them we can also call Big as Long and small as Short. You can recall some of the activities you did in the previous class to help children recollect the concept. The Stick activity or show a few leaves of different sizes.
Step 2: IN this class you are going to tell them how do we know a particular object is bigger than the other. Now ask a child to stand on the colored paper and mark the shape of their foot. And on the other side you as a teacher stand and mark the shape of your foot on a paper.
Once you have both the shapes, now cut out thefoot print and ask the children again: Which one is longer?
Step2: Wait for their answers and then further probe them to find why did they say cream is longer than the green one… Since they will not have any answer to that, so its time to proceed further and find out why one is longer than the other.
Step3: Draw a longitudinal line on the two cut outs such that it divides into two halves. Take paper clips of different sizes and start putting them on those lines.
Now its again time to ask
them – How many paper clips it took to measure cream and how many to green? Make them count. “It took 4 paperclips to measure my foot and 6 to measure the smaller foot. Does that make sense? Why or why not? What did I do wrong? How can I fix it?”
Note: As a teacher you need to bring to their notice what went wrong coz they will not be able to take notice of this difference. With this example you are setting a concrete example of why it’s important to use units that are the same size when comparing objects based on their size!
Step4: We again begin the exercise of putting the paper clips, but this time of the same size on both the cut outs so that we can measure properly and find out which is big and why.
With this activity you can note how subtraction or addition are getting subtly introduced in the mind of the child.
This activity is inspired by the following blog: http://www.kindergartenkindergarten.com/2012/06/problem-solving-measurement.html