Weight Block Continued

Still working on weights, and this week’s lesson wer so much fun!

The children expanded on last week’s experience with weighing things by hand by creating a hanging scale so they could see if each side was of equal weight based on the balance of each side of the scale. They collected materials from around the house, which included the two sand buckets, some bungie cords, a stick and some, some rope.

Within the first attempt they tied rope around the middle of the stick and hung it from the tree, then hooked the bungie cords around the buckets and slipped them onto each side of the stick. They quickly discovered that using the stick as the arm made it difficult to keep the buckets on when they were filled. While brainstorming, they got some sidewalk chalk and started drawing something to build that would keep the buckets on, and after stepping back to look at their drawing they realized it looked very similar to a clothes hanger, so they ran inside to get one out of the closet.

This worked well, and you can see their hanging scale on the left side of the image below.

They spent a good amount of time choosing different things to weigh and over time realized that for larger items a different method was needed. So they searched for a rock and board and started exploring!

All of this play and exploration is the preliminary work towards our lesson of whole to parts, stone/pounds/oz/grams. Fun stuff!