Advice on Teaching Measurement?

Question

i'm a first year 4th grade teacher and i need help teaching customary measurment (inches, feet, cups, pints, quart, gallons, etc.)

my students seem to understand all the unit of measure, but have trouble doing even simple conversions...like cups to gallons, or figuring out how many feet are in a certain number of miles.

any cool lesson ideas or tips?

as one poster below guessed...knowing whether to divide or multiply is their biggest problem...any ideas on hw to deal with this specifically?

Answer 1

I agree with the above poster... hands on is best, especially with liquid measures. However, this was always a favorite lesson and really helped give the kids a visual reference. It's a measurement man... the body is one full sheet of paper, the gallon. Then the body parts get smaller. Top of legs and tops of arms - qt. And they can be laid back over the gallon to show that 4 qts. = 1 gal. This continues on. See the following website for exactly how to do this.
This conversion in measurement is why I am a strong believer in the metric system... it just makes so much more sense! I was brought up on metric, and then got to home ec, where the teacher used emperial measures.... my poor mom thought I was going to flunk home ec because I couldn't wrap my head around the conversions!

Good luck and have fun!!

Answer 2

Well, the first thing I would do is have some jugs and cartons up in one area of the room so that the students will have a visual to compare sizes. From there, I would do some measurement activities, first using water or sand to figure out how many cups go into a gallon, etc. but then also measuring different lengths of things. If you have a football field on your school grounds, you might want to get out a measuring tape and try and measure it. Have the students try and calculate it beforehand, and see how their predictions calculated out afterwards. Get it in inches, yards, and rods if you want to go really old-fashioned. If you don't have a big field on your school property, you could always do your classroom, or the length of the hallway instead.

You might also want to consider making up a song or a rhyme mnemonic to help students remember the conversions.

Answer 3

Whatever gets you through the night is alright. also a song by John Lennon. Oh & of course, you can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes you just might find, that you get what you need, also a song by the Rolling Stones. I am being dead serious too by the way. Edit: another piece of advice that I forgot about & it's not a song, was my Dad told me pretty much anytime we would go anywhere, that one day when I started drving, that whenever I ran off the road not to jerk it back on ( over-correct ) & just ease it back on so I don't make it worse & wreck. I ran off the road a few times & I would hear his nagging voice in the background which came in handy because I've known a few people that really screwed themselves up after doing that.

Answer 4

Most kids are visual learners. I might suggest having rulers, measuring cups, a gallon jug, etc. Majority of conversion is knowing whether to multiple or divide. Seeing the objects lets kids see which is larger or smaller.
Example: Fill a cup with water. Pour it into a pint jug. Continue until pint jug is full. Let them see how many cups it took. You can do the same with the quarts and gallons.

Answer 5

I like Marilyn Burns' unit on teaching measurement.

Answer 6

hands on, using gallons jugs, measuring cups.

Do you have access to a kitchen? Have them take a fun recepie designed for 4 servings and make them convert it into servings for more people. Let them work in groups and have a contest to see who'se (cookies, chilie, cupcakes, etc) came out the best.

Answer 7

I use a visual to teach the basic concept--- Gallon Man!

http://www.twogetherexpress.com/gallon%20man2.htm

If they know GallonMan, they can easily draw pictures to do conversions.