THE TIMELINE

The two previous publications have inspired me a lot to do a very entertaining activity with the children.

To introduce them in a week or two in the field of measures, in this case the meter, in each session of mathematics we could learn how they measured in different periods, starting with the Egyptian period (which I mention in another of my publications). In this way, we could learn how it was measured in Egyptian, in Greece, in Rome, in the Middle Ages and, finally, in the current age.

In each of these sessions, we would become characters from these different eras and we would measure different parts of the school such as playground, classes, dining room, as well as smaller objects such as a case, a table or a chair. At the end of each session, the children would write the results on a piece of cardboard or a piece of paper, decorating it a little, so that finally, we would create a line of time, giving as an example the measures they have been doing in class.

At the end of the week, the children will have learned a lot of history in a very simple and dynamic way, they will have understood why now we measure through the meter and they will have many tools to make measurements and comparisons without the need of having a rule next to them.

MEASURES IN THE ANCIENT EGYPT

In this publication, I want to show a YouTube link that explains how these were measured in ancient Egypt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmsPiQFfKN4

This video is a very entertaining video that we can introduce in class with the second cycle students to learn how can you measure in Egypt. In this way, we take children out of their everyday thoughts to think in meters and centimetres and we ask them to open their minds to see that really, we can measure using a multitude of instruments.

In this class, we can all become ancient Egyptian characters and make the measurements of the school with the different tools that show us in the video.

This activity can be very fun for children and makes them have their own resources to make measurements and comparisons between different objects and distances.

In addition, we could perform a gymkhana throughout the school with different spaces and objects that should measure in certain ways in a session.

This video, I think is a great resource to make an introduction of this type of measures in a pleasant and dynamic way, since technologies are something that children love and therefore pay them a lot of attention, so it is an advantage for us that we can use them in class.

THE BIRTH OF THE METRO

In this post I want to show what happened to create a standard measure of the meter and the kilogram. This information for children can be very interesting because it is a very peculiar story and also, through it, we can create a lot of dynamics.

After much thought, the scientists agreed that the unit of measurement should have to do with the planet Earth. And they proposed: why not make the unit of length be ten millionth of a quarter of Earth's meridian?.

For a terrestrial meridian is the distance that goes from the North Pole to the South Pole and back to the North Pole, that is, a complete return to the planet through both poles. The Academy of Sciences, entrusted a group of adventurers who were to measure, not a whole meridian, which is very long, but a quarter of a meridian, which is still quite. These meters measured the distance from the city of Dunkirk, FRANCE, to that of Barcelona, ​​Spain.

From that measurement and by astronomical observations it was possible to calculate the length of the quarter of the terrestrial meridian. That number was divided by ten million. The length that resulted from that account was used to make a platinum bar baptizing it with the name of meter.

Then, several copies of the pattern meter were made and stored in a security vault, protected from rust, cold, heat and thieves. It was also decided that the kilogram would, by definition, be the weight of the water that fits in a cube one tenth of a meter on the side (that is, 10 centimeters). A standard weight of exactly one kilogram was also built and stored along with the meter. From that moment, all the measurements were comparisons with that bar and that platinum weight.

As I said at the beginning, through this story we can create a multitude of dynamics with the children in class.

One of them, which can be quite fun, is to play at being scientists and creating our own standard measure, which can be with some important object of the class or something similar, and make some measurements with it. For children, this type of dynamics can be very entertaining because it involves them directly in their own learning, which makes it very significant.