“Guess How Much I Love You” Math Lessons
If you are an early childhood educator, then “Guess How Much I Love You” probably isn’t a new title to you but the idea of using it for math may be! I’m going to show you how to use it to explore measurement using this book in a way that will coincide with your Valentine’s Day theme!
Disclaimer: The ideas I’ll share will also work well at the end of the month, when you catch all the Valentine’s candy on sale. 🙂
“Guess How Much I Love You” is a familiar book that features Big Nutbrown Hare and Little Nutbrown Hare (rabbits). It is assumed that the big rabbit is the parent and the little rabbit is the child. Throughout the course of the story, the little rabbit is trying to get the big rabbit to guess how much he loves him using different visual examples to measure. After each example, the big rabbit responds with a larger example to demonstrate that his love is biggest. This book has great measurement terminology and lends itself to introducing or reviewing measurement.
After reading this book, I introduced the concept of length and height. I taught children what it meant for something to be long, versus what it meant for something to be tall. I also showed them examples of a few long and tall items. I explained that length and height can be measured with many (standard and non-standard) items like rulers, cubes, sticks and even hugs! When it was time to demonstrate how to measure with a hug, I had a piece of pre-cut yarn, that spanned the length of my arm span (from one of me hands to another as they were stretched out).
I told my students that I loved them all this much and that this was my “hug” measured! (Gasp…Yes I told my children I loved them daily. I truly believe children need to know they are loved before they can learn.)
I demonstrated how to take my (yarn) hug and measure our carpet. We found out that the carpet was 5 hugs long! I also used my hug to measure how tall our classroom door was. We determined that the door was 4 hugs tall! At this point the children were so pumped and were curios about how many hugs different things were both inside and out!
Each child had a chance to create, label and use their own hug to compare with their friends and eventually measure items they were curious about.
Seeing how excited the children were, I decided to extend the learning and reinforce the skill with a take home project. I sent a note home to informing parents what we were learning about and invited them to participate. They were asked to measure familiar items at home with their child and record the results.
DOWNLOAD EDITABLE TAKE HOME PRINTABLE
To continue practicing non-standard measurement, we then used Valentine candy to measure on measuring mats.
Picture of measuring mat bundle…
During small group, children used candy hearts to measure items on their mat. To include literacy, we then made sentences telling how many hearts long or tall each item was. We also practiced numeral recognition by adding number tiles into our sentences.
Picture of measuring mat demonstrated
Try these with your class and leave a comment below to let me know how it goes! I’ll be waiting…🙂👀
Happy Measuring!