Before students become adept with customary (inches, feet, yards) and metric units, students can practice measuring objects with non-standard units such as white board erasers, pencils, staplers and pencils. A teacher might ask students to guess "how many sticks long" the classroom is, then demonstrate how to lay two sticks end-to-end across the room. The follow-up discussion would include questions such as what the results would be if the sticks were longer or shorter and why it might be important for the sticks to be the same length.
Loreen Leedy's picture book "Measuring Penny" is another fun way to develop measurement skills. It tells about a girl who thinks of many ways to quantify characteristics about her dog, such as using dog biscuits to measure the length of its tail. In the classroom, children can measure stuffed animals.
Drexel University's online Math Forum suggests an activity in which students measure parts of their bodies and use the results to estimate how large a giant might be. Using a measuring tape, each student measures his own height, waist circumference and foot length. Then students double, triple or further multiply those numbers to estimate how much bigger a giant would be. Then, he can consider matters such as comparing how many steps a giant would take to arrive at various locations versus the quantity of a student's steps.
Learning how to measure time from one event to another can be elusive. Children may be more motivated the elapsed time situation affects their lives. Many are interested in questions such as how long they need to wait until lunch or the end of the school day. Some teachers gain student interest by creating television viewing guides that list the start and end times of favorite student shows. Students are required to read the schedules and calculate wait times from one favorite show to another.
The Education.com website suggests three card games for students who have already been introduced to the data measurement ideas of mean (the average), median (the middle number in a data set) and mode (the most frequent number).
Each game begins by dealing seven cards to each player. In the "mean" version, a player adds up the values of his cards and divides by seven to obtain the point value of his hand. Playing "median" style, the middle value of a hand of cards represents a player's points for a round. For "mode," a player earns points only if she has two or more cards of the same value.