Measuring Temperature
Lessons in this chapter
About Measuring Temperature
Hot or Cold is a single lesson, and it does for temperature what kindergarten did for length: comparison before measurement.
Identify Objects as Hot or Cold asks kids to sort everyday things by temperature. It sounds simple, and the value is that temperature is the one quantity in this unit that cannot be seen at all, only felt, which makes it genuinely different from length, mass and capacity.
Having hot and cold as reliable categories is what makes a thermometer meaningful later. A number on a scale means nothing to a child who has not first decided that 5 degrees belongs with cold things and 40 degrees with hot ones.
Degrees, Celsius and Fahrenheit and reading a thermometer all come in later grades. This lesson is deliberately the whole of 2nd grade temperature.
Identify Objects as Hot or Cold is the chapter's single lesson, and it opens as a worksheet in the page with every sorting question marked as your child answers it. It is short on purpose: temperature is the one quantity here that can only be felt, so sorting has to come before any scale. The worksheet is free and takes one sitting.
Frequently asked questions
Sorting everyday objects and conditions as hot or cold, which is comparison before measurement. Degrees, thermometers, Celsius and Fahrenheit all come in later grades. Temperature is not part of the Common Core math standards at 2nd grade at all, so this chapter sits alongside Measurement and Data (2.MD) rather than inside it.
Sorting objects and conditions as hot or cold. Reading a thermometer and working with degrees come in later grades.
Because comparison has to come before measurement, exactly as it did for length in kindergarten. Hot and cold are the categories a thermometer scale later attaches to.
It cannot be seen at all. Length, mass and capacity can be compared by looking or holding, but temperature can only be felt, which is why it gets its own treatment.
Everyday contrasts: ice and a hot drink, a sunny day and a winter morning. Pairs work better than single objects because they force a comparison.
In later grades, once number lines and negative numbers are familiar. A thermometer is a vertical number line, so it needs that first.