A Week of Wonder: 7 Days, 7 Ways to Celebrate National Metric Week

Skyler
Oct 5
6 min read

Let’s Celebrate National Metric Week! Regardless of whether you’re a parent of a young child, an elementary school teacher, or just someone excited to learn about the metric system, you’ve come to the right place! At Science Naturally, we love highlighting the importance of learning the metric system—and what better way to explore how it works than to celebrate it for an entire week?

Keep reading to discover the many ways you can measure things in our world, and for more information, refer to our books, Talking Science and Mole and Tell.

You might be wondering, when is National Metric Week? This year, it starts on Sunday, October 5th and runs through October 11th. Each day this week will be in honor of a different type of measurement.

Let’s run through them together! Along the way, I’ll share fun at-home activities you can try to practice each measurement to help your little scientists get ready to fill their future lab coats.

Sunday: Meters

To kick off our week, let’s start with meters (m)! Meters are used to measure length, whether it’s as big as a rocketship or as small as a mouse. Depending on the size of what you’re measuring, you might use meters, centimeters (each about the size of a pea), or millimeters (each about the size of one grain of sand). For bigger things,—like a castle—meters are the best choice. For smaller things—like a toy car—centimeters work better.

Activity: Have your young one stretch their arms wide like they’re a flying airplane. Then, challenge them to "fly around” and find objects around the house or outside that are about as long as their “wingspan”—about one meter! Next, have them hold out their pointer finger like a caterpillar and look for things as wide as their fingernail—that’s about one centimeter. Let the measuring adventure begin!

Monday: Seconds

Next, we’ll learn about seconds (s) and how they measure the passing of time. One second is about as long as a quick breath in or out. Some people like to track seconds by counting “Mississippi” out loud—because saying “Mississippi” takes roughly one second. When counting, say the number followed by the word “Mississippi”, just like this: “1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, 3 Mississippi…”

Activity: First, pull up an online digital stopwatch. This will help your little scientist get familiar with syncing their “Mississippi”s to the passing seconds.

Once they’ve got the hang of it, try hiding the stopwatch for an added challenge. As they continue counting, have them raise their hand once they think 10 seconds have passed. If they were right, celebrate with them for having mastered yet another metric of measure-ment! If they were off by a few seconds, encourage them to either speed up or slow down their counting, and try, try again!

Tuesday: Kilograms

For the third day of National Metric Week, let’s talk about kilograms (kg)! Kilograms tell us how heavy something is. We use them to weigh almost anything—from a 10-year-old kid who might weigh around 30 kilograms, to an enormous elephant that can weigh as much as 6,000 kilograms!

Activity: Next time you visit a grocery store with your junior scientist, find a scale and weigh different fruits and vegetables. Before weighing, have them guess how many kilograms each item weighs—no peeking! Then, check the actual weight together. Turn it into a game: Who can guess the closest? Does a bigger fruit always mean it’s heavier? Try weighing a bunch of grapes versus a single apple and see what surprises you!

Wednesday: Kelvins

We’re over halfway through the week—woohoo! Today, we’ll discuss Kelvins (K) and how they measure temperature. Knowing the temperature of something can be super important, like when you’re baking cookies. If the temperature isn’t exactly as hot as it needs to be, your cookies might turn out underbaked—or worse, burnt!

Activity: Baking a batch of delicious cookies with your kid can be a great way to make learning both practical and fun! Don’t forget to show them what temperature you’re pre-heating the oven to. Most standard cookies will call for the oven to be set at 350°F, which is around 450 Kelvins (K).

To help them understand the Kelvin scale better, explain that zero Kelvin is the coldest temperature possible—called absolute zero—where everything stops moving! You can compare that to the warm oven temperature to show how Kelvins measure heat starting from that really, really cold point. This helps make sense of why Kelvin numbers are higher than Celsius or Fahrenheit.

Thursday: Candelas

Our fourth metric system of measurement is the candelas (cd), which measures light and the brightness of an object. For example, the light produced by a birthday candle will not be the same amount of light as produced by a spotlight on a stage. A candle will usually be around one candela, whereas a spotlight—which is bigger and more powerful—can produce about 32,000 candelas!

Activity: To get started, have an adult light a candle and set it on a safe, stable surface away from anything that could catch fire. Turn off all the lights in the room and observe how much light the candle produces. What can you see in the room? Is there anything you can’t see?

Now light another candle and see if you can spot something you couldn’t before. Remind your child that one candle equals about one candela, so two candles working together will mean there are two candelas worth of light in the room! Finally, have them blow out the candles while you turn the lights back on. What differences do they notice between the soft glow of the candles, versus the brightness of the room now lit by a standard lightbulb (which gives off around 60 candelas)?

It’s a bright reminder that not all light is created equal—and candelas help us measure just how bright things really are. For fun, ask your child to guess how bright the sun is in candelas (hint: it’s about 3 octillion candelas—that’s a 3 followed by 27 zeros!).

Friday: Amperes

It’s already the second-to-last day of National Metric Week! Today, let’s talk about amperes (or "amps" for short). Amperes (A) measure electric current—how much electricity is flowing through a circuit. For example, a phone charger usually carries about 1 ampere, while a lightning bolt on a stormy night can carry as much as 30,000 ampere).

Activity: Take a walk around the house and estimate how many amperes different devices might use. A phone charger will require one ampere, but what about a television or a coffeemaker? Ask your junior genius to make their best guess for each object. The first few will feel like a shot in the dark, but as they start comparing the size and function of different devices, their guesses may get closer and closer to the real number. Once you’ve thoroughly roamed your home, look up the actual ampere ratings online and see how close the guesses were. Celebrate any that are within the ranges offered by the internet! Did any of the answers surprise you or your child?

Saturday: Mole

Our journey is almost over, but on our last day of National Metric Week, let me tell you a bit about moles (mol). And no, we’re not talking about the furry little creatures you see outside! This kind of mole is part of the metric system, and it measures the amount of atoms or molecules in something. We know this one can be a bit tricky for little learners to wrap their heads around (and even for parents, too!), so stay tuned for a more in-depth blog post about moles to celebrate National Mole Day on October 23rd!

Activity: Have your child take one sip of water from a glass or water bottle and hold it in their mouth for a few seconds. Guess what? All that water measures out to be one mole—which is approximately 602 billion trillion water molecules! That’s a number so huge it’s almost impossible to imagine.Now, try measuring out a mole of sugar and a mole of flour. It might be tricky since a mole represents such a huge number of tiny particles, but you can use the idea to compare how much a mole of different substances weighs—this is called the molar mass.

For example, one mole of sugar weighs about 342.3 grams, while one mole of flour weighs about 120.1039 grams (but it’s molar mass is more complicated since flour is a mixture of a whole lot of things!). As a tasty bonus for all the hard brain work done this week, if you have the ingredients, while you’re already there measuring away you may as well use that flour and sugar to bake the cookies we talked about earlier!

I hope you enjoyed exploring the various ways we measure the world around us this week. We owe a lot to the brilliant scientists who created our handy-dandy metric system, and make measuring easier and more precise in our everyday lives

At Science Naturally, we share the ACS (American Chemical Society)’s goal of inspiring young minds to delve into the fascinating world of science and chemistry. Our engaging titles, such as Mole and Tell, Women in Chemistry, and Talking Science, are excellent resources for budding scientists eager to learn more.