Year 5 get measuring

Grounded in everyday life, learning about measurement is one of the most practical maths topics. Quite simply, Year 5 have got out their rulers, beakers, scales, syringes and buckets to compare measurements and solve problems.

You may recall this popular 5 litre and 3 litre riddle: the children have been rummaging their kitchen cupboards for jugs and their gardens for buckets, along with lots of water, which they’ve then used for their plants! They have used 5 litre and 3 litre containers to measure out 4 litres. They have needed to pour water out into a third container. The tricky part is that you cannot simply add the two amounts together and half the total- that would need some estimating!

The children have also continued their work on converting metric measures, using our wonderful system of place value, multiplying and dividing by multiples of 10. They have compared the metric system with imperial measurements and realised that the equivalences between these are not so logical, for example in this country, we still measure distances on a motorway in miles and the speed limit is 70mph compared with 110kmph in France.

It has been wonderful to use the resources at home for our maths learning this week. Children have dashed to their fridges in lessons to compare millilitres with pints in a bottle of milk!