Metric Measurement Conversions

I taught one of my classes this week how to convert between metric measurements. Unfortunately, the metric system is rarely used here in the United States, and students are not often exposed to opportunities to use and be aware of metric units. Inches and feet and miles they know, but can students relate to items that might be a millimeter thick or a centimeter wide? This is where we started - a dime has about the thickness of a millimeter and their textbook weighs about one kilogram. Our conversation became more lively and creative as we continued along this path, as students tried to guess what item I was about to mention. I think it left students with a better understanding of the greatness (and smallness) of these units.

I created the image above to help students learn the information and keep it in an organized representation. Originally they drew their own stair steps in their math notebooks, but I created this one to make sure my students have a legible and neat copy too. To remember the order of the steps we memorized the sentence, "Kangaroos hop down mountains drinking chocolate milk." I found that tip several years ago in my first year of teaching and have remembered it ever since. (I know from experience it is easy to remember!) Each letter stands for the prefix of one of the metric units. Though we don't often use the hecto- or deca-/deka, we keep it on the steps to keep the relationship intact between units. Each step is labeled with the prefix and a number for that unit. Notes are included that remind students that as they move down the stairs to the right, the decimal point moves to the right for the same number of places. For instance, converting from centimeters to millimeters is just one step to the right, so move the decimal point just one place to the right (30 centimeters would equal 300 millimeters).

All in all, a pretty successful lesson once the graphic organizer was utilized. With more practice and exposure we just might become experts in the metric system.