Welcome to part 3 of my STEAM skills series! If you haven't already seen them, here are links to
part 1 and
part 2. If you've been reading along, you've probably already figured out how much fun I have incorporating STEAM into my teaching!
Today I'm going to focus on measurement and graphing - they're important skills for science, math, and engineering, and they're super easy to add to your day to day classroom life.
There are lots of ways to include measurement, because there are so many things to measure! It's developmentally appropriate for young children to measure with non-standard units, that is, they don't need to use inches, centimeters, pounds or kilograms. For young children measurement should involve how many _____ long something is, filling and counting scoops, or how many _____ something weighs.
One of my favorite ways to measure with children is to cook: they can measure and count how many cups or teaspoons of each ingredient, weigh things, and of course, there's the fun of eating the finished product! (Look at the concentration on these little faces, and look how they're also developing hand strength and pouring skills as they make a birthday cake.)
You can measure with real objects - like pumpkin candies, paper clips,
or toy blocks, or you can use a measurement tool with pictures of
objects.
Measurement can also be a matter of comparing: longer or shorter, heavier or lighter. We wondered which of our vegetables was heavier than a glue bottle - and then checked to find out.
Children like to measure themselves too of course, so we laid on the floor, cut ribbon to the length of each child, and then made a cute display to show our heights.
There are so many ways to measure - but what about graphing? Isn't that more challenging? I don't find it to be! If you have a full day school program, you likely already graph daily to see who brought lunch, and who needs a cafeteria meal - our cafeteria needed that information each morning to help them prep, so the children moved their name to the correct side of the lunch count graph each morning. There's so many more things you can graph though!
How about which day each child brought something to school?
You'll notice the children's names are on this one with sticky notes - so I can use this graph time and again. Children can graph with math manipulatives...
...or by stamping or coloring a space on a paper...
or in a pocket chart!
If you need help coming up with graphing activities, check out
these resources in my TeachersPayTeachers store - including 3 FREE resources! Some of the other photos included in this blog are of resources I've created, you can also click on those to see more.
I hope you've found some new ideas in this blog post, and that you'll come back next week to continue this STEAM skill series! Happy Teaching!
Paula
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