I’ve yet to meet a child who doesn’t love measuring tapes. Â You know, those cool retractable kind that you pull out and then let go and it snaps back into place? Â Well, we made our own measuring tapes in preschool this week…
To make these fun take-home measuring tapes we used long sentence strips, paper tubes, markers, and heavy duty straws…
The children began this project by creating their “ruler” or tape that would go inside our paper tube. Â They did this by drawing lines at various increments on their sentence strip (any long strip of paper will do). Â We encouraged the children that were ready to also try write numbers next to their lines. Â We celebrated all attempts at writing numbers, for this was really one of the first formal ways we invited the children to write out all their numbers…
After the children had their “rulers” drawn on their long strip of paper, we attached it to the straw with a piece of tape.  We taped it at the end of our numbers, so that when we pulled it out of our tape measure, it would start at number one.  If you don’t have sturdy straws, you could just as easily use a pencil or wooden dowel rod.  While Deborah and I were helping individual children with their tape, we suggested that they may want to decorate the outside of their tape measures ..
Once we had all of the children’s rulers taped to their straws, the rulers were ready to be rolled up…
Deborah and I showed the children two ways to roll up their long strips of paper. Â Deborah showed them how to roll their paper on the table. Â I showed the children how to roll it the paper in their hands. Â The children could then choose whichever method worked best for them…
Once the paper rulers were all rolled up, the children were ready to put them in their paper tubes…
Prior to the start of our activity, I cut a long slot in each of the paper tubes so that we could feed our tape measure through it. Â Now the children could pull their tape measure out and begin measuring with it…
Once the children had pulled out their tape measure all the way, the challenge was trying to reel it back in. Â Deborah and I showed the children how to twist and turn the straw to get the tape to retract – talk about fine motor work! Â The retracting part didn’t exactly work easily but the children were up for the challenge …
The process of writing, counting, and creating combined produced some beautiful hand-made tape measures for furthering our exploration of measuring length.
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