Measuring Belugas

To round out our discussion of beluga whales, and to teach a little in the way of standard measurements, my son and I decided to represent the size of a beluga on our floor with painter's tape.

I found some rulers and we talked for a very brief moment about what a ruler is and how it works. Then we started marking off 15 feet (according to my research on the size of an average beluga whale), foot by foot, on my floor. For every foot we put a small piece of tape, and when we got to 15 we stopped. I was thrilled that my son was counting the increments as we went, and that it gave him lots of practice in counting up to 15. Next, I had to spend some time making an outline of a beluga whale that encompassed all of the 15 feet we just marked off. Good thing it didn't take that long. Less than five minutes.

It was impressive to see how big a beluga would really be if it was swimming around in our house and my son was pretty excited about it. I made him lay down next to the whale and I measured him with tape and we looked at the difference. We then found other things to measure ourselves and the whale with--for example, we have a wooden gravestone as one of our halloween decorations, so we used that for measuring. We learned that the whale is 7.5 gravestones, and my son is about 2.5 gravestones. It was pretty cool to get some non-standard measurement ideas in there too.

I'm happy with this activity.  The method of measurement, in various forms, has been successfully explored. AND, it was a lot of fun!