As I am not a classroom teacher, I chose to do this activity with my four-year-old daughter. Below is documentation of our measuring and estimating experience.
Together, we selected four balls from her bin of outdoor toys. We selected a large pink bouncy ball, a blue soccer ball, a pink basketball, and a small white plastic baseball. We looked around the yard for places we could roll our balls and then measure the distance that the rolled. My daughter decided that the best place to roll them would be down the slide on the playset.
Once we had gathered some data from our experiment, I put it into a Google Spreadsheet and created a chart. I charted her estimated order for the farthest traveling ball as well as the order of the actual order for the distance traveled. To view the estimated order as well as the actual order, hover over the bars on the chart below.
If you are unable to view the chart below, click here.