Having taught 5th grade and middle school math, I know that not only do students often struggle with measurement conversions but teachers struggle with how to help students GET IT! It's quite an abstract concept. So since a majority of my students benefited from remediation with concrete objects, I found myself searching for (holds my head in shame) tricks to help them understand it.
(We would teach the student to set up a ratio, multiply the two numbers that were across from each other and circle the number that didn't have a partner across from it. Then divide the product of the "bat" by the "ball")
What I wish someone would have told me (or I wish
NIX THE TRICKS (click on the link for the digital book!) was published at the time) was that tricks AREN'T for kids. Tricks only put a band-aid on the open wounds of math gaps. I'll admit, SOME of my students got it, but I was still only showing students a temporary process that made very little connection to THE MATH and adding to the arsenal of math steps they had collected throughout their elementary career). While it might have helped develop their background of ratios, it didn't explain why some inches were a fractional piece of a foot.
So, here I am, some 16 years later, hoping to help YOU make sense of that math so you can "pay it forward" to your students. Believe it or not, students begin to hate math around middle school and it's primarily our fault. We have crammed tricks and steps and songs- all meaningless- into their heads. At some point, they think math is some huge mystery that can never be conquered; rather than a cool puzzle wrapped in a series of inter-related patterns with various paths to the same end.
How to use concrete materials, such as a ruler and color tiles, to help students visually see how the inches in between each foot serve as a fraction of a foot! I'll be trying it with some students I work with; if you try it this Spring...Let me know how it goes!
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