How Does Measuring using a ruler (cm)- grade 2 Work?

Measuring with a ruler is like counting steps to find out how long something is.

Imagine you have a ruler that has little lines on it, these are called centimeters, or cm for short. Each line stands for one step in your counting game. When you want to know how long a pencil is, you put the start of the ruler at one end of the pencil and see where the other end lands.

The ruler has numbers on it, these are like markers telling you how many centimeters you've counted. If your pencil ends right after the number 10, that means it's 10 cm long, just like counting from 1 to 10!

You can think of a ruler like a train track, each centimeter is a car in the train. Your pencil is the train. When you place the ruler next to your pencil, you're seeing how many cars (cm) fit along its length.

When you’re done measuring, you just say, “This pencil is as long as 10 cars on the track!”, and that’s how you know it's 10 cm!