Measuring with fruit

This term, my Year 1s have been learning about fruits.  We've learned plátanos, manzanas, naranjas, fresas, ciruelas and peras.  These are some of the activities we have done:

• Some simple writing of the fruit words
• "Fruit crush" from Take 10 en español
• Game using number cards, where a fruit is underneath each number 1-6.  One child nominates a number, a second child says which fruit they think is under there, and a third child lifts up the number to see if they are right.
• Read Limón and wrote and recorded our own versions (these are some of last year's)
• Sang La canción de las frutas
• Read Yummy Yucky (there is now a bilingual version of this) and then a Spanish version that I wrote

The week before half term, the class teacher had, by chance, left open by the computer a copy of the children's Inspire Maths workbook.  The next thing that children were going to do in maths was measurement.  This was something I could do in Spanish!

Before half term I took a metre rule into the Y1 classroom to measure things like the chairs and tables, to get an idea of the size of unit the children would need to use for the measuring, given that we couldn't use any numbers bigger than 10.  Consequently I made 3 large A4-size versions of each of the fruits (see picture above!) which my daughter laminated for me.

Here's what we did in the lesson:

• We practised the fruit words again (it had been half term!)
• We practised the numbers 1-6 and then sang this song a few times to introduce the numbers 1-10.
• I showed the children the huge fruits, and demonstrated how to measure things in the classroom using the fruit.  We found out that the whiteboard is 6 oranges high, one of their little chairs is 2 pears high, and one of the girls is 4 strawberries high.
• Using our numbers and fruit words we worked out how to say these measurements - seis naranjas, dos peras, cuatro fresas.
• I gave each pair of children a fruit.  They got a mini-whiteboard between them to record their results.  I said they could write the name of the thing they measured or draw a picture of it to help them to remember, and then write how many of their fruit it was long or high. 
• At the end we fed back and worked out how to say the measurements in Spanish.

The children were very focused and enjoyed the measuring.  I also got measured a few times!  If I was doing this again it would be great to take them outside.  Even though Wednesday was a sunny 16 degrees day, it was also the last session of the day, and I'm not sure I would have got all the children back in again!

This lesson could be adapted for older children, simply by giving them a smaller unit so that they have to use bigger numbers.  It's a great way to reinforce the plural form as well.