September 23: Weigh In!

I found this fabulously simple idea in The Preschooler's Busy Book by Trish Kuffner.  I pulled the bathroom scale downstairs for Ty and Brielle.  They love standing on it and watching the number pop up.  Tysen weighed 38.8 lbs. and Brielle was 23.2 lbs.  We talked about that Ty's number was bigger because he's a bigger boy that Brielle and that makes him heavier. 

The idea from the book was to find items around the house to weigh and figure out what weighed more, less, or the same as the kids.  Ty just wanted to weigh his favorite toys, though, and none of them are even close to his weight.  Nor were they heavy enough register on the bathroom scale.  Fortunately, I have a kitchen scale, so I pulled that out and Ty was unbelievably excited to weigh all of his favorite things.  We tried to line them up lightest to heaviest, but many of them weighed the same.  I did ask Tysen a bunch of questions as we were playing around with the scale: 

• Why did Ferdinand weigh more than Thomas (Ferdinand has a tender!)
• Before we weigh Sally and Mater, hold them in your hands and guess who will be heavier (Mater because he's bigger!)
• Will Bash and Dash weigh the same? (Yes!  They're twin trains.). 

He created his own hypothesis when he brought Cranky the Crane to the scale and said, "Maybe Cranky is the heaviest!"  (He was right!)  When he placed 3 Bob the Builder machines on the scale at the same time he said, "Three are the betterest!" (meaning heaviest). 

He weighed toys for over 30 minutes!  We'll have to do this again someday...maybe we can branch out from die-cast toys and compare books, tools, and other household items.

The lineup:  lightest to heaviest.