Converting in the Real World

About a week and a half ago I talked to my 5th Grade Math Teacher about what was coming up and to see if technology might play a role in it. She had mentioned that she was in the middle of unit conversions.  We spent a while trying to come up with an activity that would both challenge the student as well as be "real world." After coming up with a couple of ideas that were pretty blasé, we both had an idea and really built on it! The teacher had decided that she wanted to break her classroom up into multiple stations that had various types of real world unit conversions. For instance, in one station, she had a gallon of Chic-Fil-A tea (emptied) in which students would have to find the number of Liters and convert it to Milliliters. Another station included a center in which students had to go to Google Maps and get the distance between our campus and NRG Stadium and covert it from Kilometers to Meters! In a group, students would have to convert the items and then put them into Pic Collage. Students would rotate to different stations when they finished converting their items. The first time we did this activity, things didnt go quite as planned, however, we talked during break and made a few adjustments. By the time the afternoon group rolled around, things went much more smoothly and it was really clicking with the students! It was so great to see students use "real world" items to help transform the learning!