Weighing and Balancing – How to Make a Simple Balance

“I want to know if it weighs more, or the same” He demanded.

“Ok, that’s easy, we’ll just weigh them” I suggested, then I remembered our kitchen scales were not packed in a box somewhere.

Of course my five year old needed to do this now, not tomorrow, not in a little while… now!

I could have scrambled through boxes trying to find the one with the scales in it, but considering we live in a building site it seemed easier (and more fun) to make a simple balance instead!

To Make a Simple Balance…

You’ll Need :

A plank of wood (we used an off-cut of recycled floor boards)
A piece of dowel, broom handle or other round wood as long as your plank is wide (we used two wooden blocks glued together)
A hot glue gun
A ruler or measuring tape.
A pencil, or something to mark the wood.

You’ll Do:

Measure your plank of wood and mark a line across the centre.

Warm up your glue gun and just putting a little glue at each end of the line (start with a little bit of glue so you can move the wood around till it is balanced), glue on your round wood as close to the centre line as you can get them.

Flip your balance over and see if it will balance (or almost balance), if not gently move the round wood until you get it as close to balancing as possible. If you need to you can warm up the glue a little by holding the hot end of the glue gun against it.

It took us a while, and some trial and error to get our balance to balance, I think it would have been easier if we’d used lighter wood, but in the end we had it just balancing on it’s own.

Now for the fun part!

Collect up some things to weight. We began with some animal counters because we knew they all weighed the same amount. Then we got out some glass pebbles and wooden people.

We had lots of fun testing to see which of the people weighed the most and how we could change the balance by moving them closer to or further from the middle of the board.

This is far from an accurate measure of weight, but it was lots of fun and a great way to experiment with concepts such as more, less, same, weight, balance and number and we had a great time weighing and balancing.