Recently, at the library, a book about an inch worm caught my eye (Inch by Inch, by Leo Lionni). This cute little picture book is about a cleaver little inch worm who convinces a robin, who is about to eat him for lunch, that he is usefull and can measure the robin. The robin wants his tail measured so he does not eat the worm. After his tail is measured, carries the worm off to measure other birds. One bird at the end makes an unusual request, measure my song. Well the worm feels he can't do that so he finds a cleaver way to escape.
I thought about this and although it is true you might not be able to measure a song the same way you measure a tail or a beak, you can measure it. I think you could measure it by seeing how many times the worm can move during the song, or by how may seconds long the song is, and I am sure in other ways that I am not thinking of. I decided that this might be a fun measuring experience for my daughter and I to experiment with.
So we read the book and discussed different ways the worm might have approached this problem. We then made an inch worm out of playdoh and started measuring things. We then turned on a song and experiemented with measuring the song with how many times we could move the worm during the duration of the song. We also observed how the song was a particular length of time.
My daughter seems to have enjoy and absorbed both of these measurement methods as she had been going back to them both frequently over the last few days. :) I hope you find this useful and have fun with finding ways to measure a song and other things in your house.
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| Reading Inch by Inch by Leo Lionni. |
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| Using the playdoh worm to measure the robin's tail. |
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| Time is one measure of a song's length. |
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| Other ways to measure. |
