New Perspectives in Science Education

As part of a project, pre-service teachers designed and led activities involving length and capacity magnitudes in two classes of first year of Primary Education (PE). Such activities involved comparison, ordering and measurement of quantities using arbitrary units such as strides, ropes of different lengths and glasses of different shapes and sizes, water and rice. This helped pre-service teachers to ground the contents of a third year course of the degree and to make connections with their future professional practice, as well as to provide primary school students with a first approach to these magnitudes in an outdoor space. There were 4 spaces with different activities, two of them were devoted to capacity and the other two to length. Each class was divided into four groups and each group was placed in one space, and such groups had to rotate once the activities of such spaces were finished by them. Activities where designed by pre-service teachers where they were asked to predict the errors and difficulties that the primary school students would have while developing the tasks. And other pre-service teachers were the ones who led these activities and saw if these errors and difficulties actually appeared.