HOW TO WORK MEASUREMENT WITH CHILDREN

The most appropriate way to start measuring with students is, above all, creating them the necessity to measure. When people realize that something truly serves the reality of their day-to-day life, it is when they begin to be truly interested in learning it. In this way, if children realize that measurement is something that will work for their lives, it will be more interesting and meaningful learning for them.

The objective of working with measurement is:

• To discover the necessity of measurement.
• To understand that to measure is to compare.
• To discover that we use units to measure.
• To discover that the measurement depends on the chosen unit and not on the quantity to be measured.

How does a child learn to measure? 

The process proceeds sequentially from perception to comparison. Measurement begins with the perception of what should be measured. Undoubtedly, some attributes can be perceived more simply than others. A child's height makes sense of length, weight does not.

Perception is the beginning of measurement, and comparison follows perception. Having perceived some property of some object, in some way, it is compared to other objects that have the same property. The comparison of two things is appropriate when we want to make equivalence or non-equivalence statements: "you are taller than me", "I am taller than my sister". These comparisons are, at some point, insufficient. "Patterns" are needed to allow comparison. For example, the length of the hand, or the foot.

Unconventional standards or units are useful for comparison, but are also insufficient. Units of measurement have at least two important functions. Firstly, they allow a person to communicate one measure to another in an abbreviated and direct way. Second, they allow accurate and consistent measurements in different countries. This has given rise to the International System (IS).

The need for conventional standards arises from the need to communicate the information, from a measurement made and that it be understood by other people who have not participated in the action of measuring the object in question.

It is important to indicate the need for the use of different units to measure and their equivalences. Thus, children, from the initial level, will use different units to measure the same length, verifying that the length does not vary, but the measurement does.

Working with unconventional patterns or units, measuring lengths with different patterns, allows us to begin to form the idea of ​​equivalences between units.