Teaching Size, Area and Scale

Abstract

Gaining an understanding of scale, area and size is an important part of the subject of Art and crafts. Although this skill should be practiced, perhaps even mastered, by pupils in primary education, it is regarded as difficult to teach, due to the skill being intangible and difficult to discuss. This paper seeks to aid in overcoming these difficulties, as it gathers initial findings from ongoing interviews with teachers on their strategies for teaching this important skill. Instead of highlighting one strategy as the best, we wish to showcase a broad range of appropriate approaches to this theme. Tensions between these approaches are also discovered and discussed to highlight the inherent properties of the different strategies.