Teaching Conversions - Anchor Charts, Flip Charts, Stations & More

I know there are many teachers out there with blogs that talk about all the different things they do in class and the specifics of how they taught the material. Up to this point, my blog hasn't really been about that. I have been keeping this blog to have some record to look back on from my first year of teaching. Back in the fall, I did talk about my Fantasy Football that I did in class, and that was really my only taste of kind of showing off my stuff. This past week my students and I worked with conversions, and I decided to document and layout in detail what we did.

Here goes nothing...

I was planning out what to do during the week, and I was struggling with deciding what to do first. I landed on introducing the kiddos to all the different types of units before I even mention converting between them. I felt that it was important to have a good idea of what the units represented first. I found some anchor chart ideas, and I made an anchor chart representing each of the three measurements:
Length
Weight
Capacity
I had the kids organize the information in a flip chart with each flap of the flip chart representing a different type of measurement. I spent a few days and went into detail covering what each unit was. I tried to give the kids real life connections for things in hope that they'll have a better idea. One example was for miles. I looked up a place that all the kids would know that was about a mile away. Turns out our Dairy Queen is about a mile away from our school. When I told the kids about how far it was, they really had a good understanding of what a mile was. Real life connections, I feel, are so crucial to help the kiddos understand. Below are the three anchor charts that I made.

 

 The big part of measurements is the conversions. The kiddos need to be pretty efficient at converting between the different units. After each section of the flip chart, I introduced the basic conversions and we practiced a little bit with each measurement. Obviously they need more exposure than that to converting. One really big thing that I was (am) emphasizing is the use of the STAAR chart that they will have access to during the STAAR test. I'm calling it their "Cheat Sheet". Who doesn't want to use a thing called a cheat sheet?! Each kid has to have it out before I'll help them. The majority of information that they should need is on the cheat sheet, especially with conversions. 

So, I had to come up with something for the kids to further their mastery with conversions, and I wanted it to be something that the kids would be excited about. I decided to do stations. I decided to come up with four stations. I used QR codes that link to the PDFs for each of the four stations. 

My first two stations came from Teaching With A Mountain View. She has an awesome TpT product on conversion task cards! I bought those because they really offer up great practice questions on conversions. The picture below is one of the groups at one of these stations. They used their IPads to scan the QR codes, and of course, they all have their cheat sheets out!

 For my third stations, I decided to come up with my own assessment. If you don't know me, my classroom is full of Minions! I call my kiddos Mouton's Minions, so the Minions have been a big part of my class throughout the year. I wanted to create something along the lines of converting between Minion units and human units. My idea was that the Minions would hypothetically use smaller units than humans because they're obviously smaller than us. So... I developed Minion Town! The kiddos would scan the QR code, and up pops Minion Town. To sum up Minion Town, it tells the students that they have to help the Minions because they only have access to human units and need them converted to Minion units to understand what they're talking about. My kids loved it! When I set up my TpT store, the Minion Town will definitely be on it. So, it you're interested please stand by!

I created a table with different items. Next to the items, was the human measurement & Minion measurement. I differed the missing units between human and Minion that they the students have to be able to convert both ways. I was very happy with the success of the this station, and I really think that it was one of my kids' favorites.

My last station I decided that kiddos need practice with measuring items with their "cheat sheets". They were required to go around the room and the hallway and find six different items to measure (3 in centimeters & 3 in inches). After they finished measuring the items, they recorded each on their answer sheets. Next, they were required to write a blog post about the station. The kiddos had to meet these requirements.
- Each item measured and their lengths
- Which was the biggest? Smallest?
- "How To?" on how to measure using their STAAR charts

The kids love writing in their blogs, and what a great opportunity to have some writing in math class!

Overall, I think the kiddos really got a lot out of our conversion unit. I'll still continue to work with, and I'll throw some more practice in our daily spiraling warm up. With the flip chart and stations, I think that the kids had a really great time working with this unit. I know that I'll tweak it for next year and it's no where near perfect, but I thought it went really well.

I know this was a long blog post for my usual readers, but I really want to start having more posts like this. Thanks for reading!