We started our second measurement block, weight, this week after a month away for some play with words.
To start this block we reviewed linear measurement (you can find a glimpse of it HERE) and continued our story of the King who just wanted everyone to bring him things as he expected 😂. Poor king, just when he gets lengths sorted he needs to deal with weights!
The children experienced weight in a variety of ways. They weighed objects around them using just one hand, holding a single object in one hand and then putting it down and picking up another object with the same hand to see if they could feel a difference in weight. Then they compared two objects using both hands so they could compare the weight at the same time.
The next day instead of random objects around the house that the children collected, I placed five potatoes and five oranges on the table. The children were asked to weigh potatoes against oranges and quickly discovered hands wouldn’t cut it! They brainstormed some solutions and first tried using bowls, but found they were very difficult to keep balanced on hands. Then they thought of using sand pails. They discovered, even with the pails, it was still difficult to weigh them against each other. After some thinking they remembered the yoke they used at the Sugar Bush a few weeks back and created one with some spare lumber. The yoke worked well, but neither child knew if the yoke had been invented during the King’s time (ha ha), so they also found that using their outstretched arms and hanging a bucket on either wrist worked like a yoke in a pinch.
After creating a short summary of what was discovered, my eldest took over the chalkboard and created a drawing for a main lesson page. Lately, they’ve been doing all the chalkboard drawings for summaries and I love it!
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