Module 3: Investigating measurement and data handling

Section 1: Introducing measurement

Key Focus Question: How can you explore pupils’ prior knowledge of measure, and plan practical activities to develop understanding?

Keywords: planning; measurement; heartbeat; mind map; prior knowledge; resources

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this section, you will have:

  • used mind maps to find out what pupils already know about measurement and measuring;
  • used cross-curricular teaching to see how subject areas are interlinked;
  • planned your lessons to meet pupils’ needs in developing their understanding of measure.

Introduction

We measure lots of things in our daily lives, such as our height, the weight of our vegetables, how far we have walked.

What examples of measurement would you expect your pupils to be familiar with? Without class-sets of measuring instruments, how can your pupils work with real quantitative data, so that they understand where the numbers come from and what they mean? And how do you help them make sense of prefixes like ‘mega-‘ and ‘milli-‘? This section will help you explore all of these issues.

1. Using mindmaps