To teach measurement to young learners!

When we design activities to teach something to students, it is necessary to think about their needs, their learning styles, and where they are cognitive. Thus, it will be easier for us to plan the teaching according to them. Concretely, in the didactic of measurement, will be interesting to remind some aspects affirmed by Piaget.  

Although in primary education, most of the children are in the concrete operational stage, we have a small group of students that are in the prior stage. Therefore, it is essential, especially in the first years, to consider and foster activities that foster the development of the conservation capacity of objects and the acquisition of the reversibility principle.

As Godino, Batanero, & Roa, (2002), affirm when children have acquired it if they don't go with the flow of their perception. Besides, the planning of activities, in which children have to identify what objects' property changes or not, will allow facilitating their cognitive development in the aspects explained.

For instance, the length conservation, as well as the distance between two objects in which there is another object in the middle, are aspects that should be worked during the first years of primary education (Godino, Batanero, & Roa, 2002).

In that sense, the implementation of manipulative materials will help them. We can propose children several activities and even games in which they have the opportunity to look to one object, approximate the measurement of the object, and then check it with a metre. Besides, I want to highlight that the use of different material and resources to measure objects will give children opportunities to develop their creativity and discover the reality of the measurement and its application to the real life.

References: 

Godino, J. D., Batanero, C. & Roa, R. (2002). Medidas de magnitudes y su didáctica para maestros. En J. D. Godino (Ed.), Matemáticas y su Didáctica para maestros: Manual para el Estudiante. https://www.ugr.es/~jgodino/edumat-maestros/manual/5_Medida.pdf

Pictures with Creative Commons licence, retrieved from https://www.pexels.com/es-es/photo-license/