Maths Measuring Animals

I have put together a simple yet effective activity to support children in exploring height, measuring, counting and ordering. There are many different learning and development opportunities planned for through out this activity and it can be repeated regularly.

All you need for this activity is to print out and laminate different sized animals I have done 11 but you could do more to challenge older children, or less to make it simpler. You will also need something to measure the animals with I used multilink with the reception class then glass beads at home, however you could use flowers, bottle top lids, buttons or Lego, whatever you have available.

I began this activity by asking the children to put the animals in order from smallest to biggest. This ignited lots of conversation around which animal was taller and which animal was shorter, encouraging the use of mathematical language such as tall, short, big, small and wide. This also resulted in discussions around different opinions as one child thought an animal was taller than another, promoting team work, compromising and understanding of other peoples ideas.

Once the animals were all in order we counted how many animals we have and talked about the different animals, where they live and what colours they were. I then challenged the children to find out how tall each animal was. We measured them in the classroom using multilink cubes however we do not have these at home so instead we used glass beads.

The children then counted how many glass beads tall each animal was and looked at the colours of the beads. We discovered if we had ordered them correctly, if any animals were the same height and which was the tallest and shortest. Supporting children's counting, maths and reflecting skills. You could extend this activity by making a tally chart stating how tall each animals is, providing another way for children to look back and visually see which animal is taller and shorter.

The children also compared the smallest and tallest animals, counting the number of beads tall the animals were. Leading on to conversations about the height of the animals in real life. To extend this activity further you could look in books and on the internet to find out how tall some of the animals are and see if you have enough beads to lay out to represent their actual height and have the children lay down next to it to see if they are as tall as a tiger, for example. This is also a great opportunity to introduce units of measurement with older children such as centimetres and meters, using rulers to measure the animals.

Once we had completed the maths measuring animals activity and met the main aims I had planned for, the children enjoyed using the animals in imaginary play, feeding them the beads as food. This was unplanned for but a lovely end to the activity.

I have given lots of ideas on how to use the animal resources providing plenty of opportunities to revisit this activity and build on learning and development as the children's abilities, focus and concentration increases.

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