Week 1, continued

The second day of class went a bit differently because the schedule for the students is slightly different, so I only got to see the 6th and 7th graders.  Both classes were doing a lesson to learn about the metric system since none of them had very much experience with it previously.  The main focus of the lesson was to have them gain practical experience with the metric system and get them to understand the powers of ten for unit conversion.

Techniques Used

Journal Warm-ups

We started off having the students draw a table in their warmup notebook with columns for measurements in meters, centimeters, and millimeters.  The students then recorded measurements of their desks with a partner in each of the units and then reported their measurements back to the class.  We asked them questions to direct their thinking so that they recognized the measurements were the same, just with shifted decimal points.

Worksheet and Measurement 'Cheatsheet'

We then gave a cheatsheet showing the relationship between each power of ten with spaces for the students to fill in the relationship between more distant units (e.g., cm and km).  They carried this cheatsheet around with them as they went to different stations where they had to measure various items (pencils, their height, their shoes, a stack of pennies).  There were a few thought questions as well  where the students had to think about how many of their shoes it would take to span 100m and how tall a stack of 1000 pennies would be.

How it Went

Journal Warm-ups

These went quite well, and the students all easily saw the pattern of shifted decimal point.

Worksheet and Measurement 'Cheatsheet'

The seventh graders did very well with the measurements, understanding the conversions, and doing the math.  The sixth graders, however, were not as successful and had real difficulty converting between units and could not understand how to convert from distant units like centimeters to kilometers.  Some of the problems were solved when we gave concrete examples that they could work with instead of just asking them to do abstract math in their heads.