Measuring Tools

© Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Early Education and Care. All rights reserved.

Toddlers are interested in learning to use all kinds of tools. Give them lots of chances to play with measuring tools as they fill, pour, dump, and fit one thing inside another. Here are a few activities that will help them become familiar with math tools and let them have lots of fun.

• Invite toddlers to help you in kitchen projects such as making play dough, measuring ingredients, or counting out snacks for each child.
• Make your sand table (or a large plastic bin) a “measuring zone.”
  • Fill the table with sand, beans, or water, or an unusual material such as wood chips. Add measuring cups and spoons, bowls, plastic containers, and stirrers.
  • Let toddlers explore filling and emptying or have them pretend to measure ingredients for a recipe.
• Put measuring spoons, scoops, and recycled containers of different sizes in the sandbox (or large plastic bin). Add pails, shovels, and dump trucks.
  • Talk with children as they fill up smaller containers and dump them into larger ones. Have them guess how many yogurt containers it will take to fill the dump truck.
  • Explore and talk about what happens when they move all the sand from a full pail into yogurt containers.

Toddlers also like to play with tools that measure time and weight, such as kitchen timers, stopwatches, and balance scales. You may want to include these in the activities above.