Cold Measurement

I love to incorporate more than one subject at a time when possible. It not only saves time, but makes connections that are so important for children to understand.

Making measurement notes.

Last week, we were blessed with a dry snow that led to lots of snow drifts. I sent the kids on their merry way with a clipboard and measuring tools in hand. Their job was to find and measure as many snow drifts and icicles as possible, noting measurements on a scrap piece of paper.

Measuring icicles on the van.

Measuring icicles on the watering trough.

Measuring a small snow drift near the house so mom could get a picture from her cozy perch inside.

Preschoolers and dogs enjoy helping, too!

After a warm cup of hot chocolate, I pulled out these two notebooking pages from the Snow and Ice NaturExplorers study. (For the record, the pages within the unit are in color. I was out of color ink, so copied them in gray scale.)

On The Measure of Snow, they took their snow drift measurements and created a graph to display the information. My daughter began with a line graph, then changed her mind to watercolor a bar graph. Thus the eraser marks!

On Interesting Icicles, I had them order their measurements from shortest to longest and draw a picture of an icicle up-close. My oldest had to create her own graph from the icicle information, too.

They LOVE this kind of math – hands-on, active, meaningful, real. And, I didn’t have one complaint as they joyfully learned about and practiced accurate measuring, ordering mixed/decimal numbers, and completing/creating graphs. Ah, a fun time of math and nature study, indeed. (And I didn’t have to get out in the cold to boot!)