Concepts - Exploring 'BIG and small'

What’s included?
x5 pages, landscape orientation in colour to investigate the concepts ‘BIG’ and ‘small’.

Who’s it for?
This resource has been designed for early years aged children, pupils in year one as well as older students needing additional learning support.

Resource Details
Page 1 is a visual reference sheet which could be used for display purposes but has been designed to be used as a point of discussion about what ‘BIG’ and ‘small’ means…

As a teacher/adult led discussion learners could explore what the concepts ‘big ‘ and ‘small’ mean. There are x9 pairs of images displayed on page 1, each showing items that are (when compared to each other in the ‘real world’) ‘big’ or ‘small’. Learners could first work together to identify what the big and small item is in each pair.

The images shown for comparison and discussion are:

• the world (big) with a space rocket (small)
• a table (big) with a cup (small)
• a factory (big) with a bike (small)
• a tower block (big) with a person/woman (small)
• a flower (big) with a bee (small)
• a plate (big) with a pea (small)
• a tree (big) with a bird (small)
• an elephant (big) with a mouse (small)
• mountains (big) with a person hiking (small)

Once the big/small item in each pair has been identified learners could go on to consider mixing up the items in the pictured pairs - e.g. if the ‘elephant’ was compared with the ‘world’ instead of the ‘mouse’ which would be big and which would be small? The images on pages 2 and 3 could be used as a matching activity for learners to think about and explore this further.

Pages 2 and 3 are for learners to use to record three sets of pairs of items that are (when compared with each other in the real world) BIG or small. The BIG item in each pair is the be positioned on the right and the small item in each pair is to be positioned on the left. There are three spaces (for three pairs) on page 2 and page 3, learners could complete two pages (2 and 3!)

Pages 4 and 5 display the images from page 1 ready to be cut up (dotted lines guide where to cut) and placed in pairs on pages 2 and 3 (or page 6). Learners could pair up the images as featured on page 1 (see this list of big/small pairs above) OR learners could pair the images differently. However the learners pair up the images the idea is to pair one BIG and one small item when thinking about the size of these items in the ‘real world’ and not the size of the image as pictured on these sheets. This may confuse some learners and they will really need to think about these items/images carefully where pairing a big and small image together before securing them with glue on pages 2/3/6.

Page 6 provides an opportunity for learners to draw and label their own (real world) BIG and small images.

Important message…
ANY issues with any of this please don’t hesitate to let me know - I am happy to make changes. Feedback of this resource would be wonderful! Thank you!