6 Summary of Week 7

In Week 7 you have seen how it is important to be aware of different measuring scales and the various types of measuring instruments. Taking a measurement involves human judgement which is therefore limited to a particular degree of accuracy. For example, we can usually only measure lengths correct to the nearest millimetre.

You have also read a brief summary of the development of measuring systems such as the imperial system and the metric system. Giving learners a history of how measures were developed can be interesting and demonstrate how the use of measures drives from human activity.

You should now be able to:

• check that your learners use measuring tools such as rulers, appropriately, for example making sure they put the zero on the ruler at the beginning of the line they are attempting to measure. When measuring an angle, checking that they place the protractor correctly and read from the appropriate scale
• help learners understand that area is a measurement (by unit squares) of the amount of space within a 2D shape and that volume is a measurement (by unit cubes) of the amount of space within a 3D shape
• derive the area formulas of a parallelogram and a triangle from the area formula of a rectangle.

Next week you will focus on data handling, specifically statistics and probability.

You can now go to Week 8