Balancing

Online Learning

Focus: Thinking Skills, Research Skills, Self-management Skills

How heavy is the 🍎 apple?

  • How can we find out?
  • Can we use other materials and objects to weight the apple?  

Let’s read the story ‘BALANCING ACT’ by Ellen Stoll Walsh to explore weight and balance.

In this story, two mice 🐁🐁 make a teeter-totter. They play on their teeter-totter, balancing each other out until their friends come along to join their play. They think of different ways to include their friends, which leads to solving problems with weight and balance.

How might we make our own balancing scale?

Here is one way to create your own balancing scale. You might have other ideas to create your own scale! Follow the instructions in the video to make a balancing scale. 

Materials Needed:

  • 2 cups/small containers
  • 1 clothes hanger
  • A sharp object (to make the holes)
  • 4 pieces of twine about 60cms in length 

Steps:

  1. You may need an adults help to use a sharp object, or a hole punch to make holes in 2 small containers as shown in the instructional video. 
  2. Cut 4 pieces of twine about 60cms in length. The twine needs to be thick and strong enough to make the balance scale more durable.
  3. Tie the ends of the twine through the holes in the containers to the ends of the clothes hanger as shown in the instructional video.
  • What weighs the same?
  • How heavy or light are different objects or substances?
  • How might we weigh different materials and substances such as liquids and solids? 

Light and Heavy What things are light? What things are heavy? Let’s explore the concept of weight through this non-fiction picture book. In Light and Heavy, a girl investigates what she can and cannot lift.

Through this invitation, the children can investigate how objects have attributes which can be measured using non-standard units, which can then be used to sort and compare. 

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