I
am teaching my sixth grade student conversions from the customary
system (inches, feet, miles, cups, ounces) to the metric system (liters,
centimeters, grams).
The
hardest part of teaching the metric system is that my daughter does not have any concept of how big a centimeter is, or how far a
kilometer is. She does not have a reference for it.
I found a website that another blogger uses that is incredibly useful: The Scale of the Universe 2
The
Scale of the Universe is a neat wonderful Flash app. Zoom in and it shows
you the smallest things in the universe—smaller than atoms, smaller than
electrons—and their metric measurements.
That's tiny.
Zoom
out, and it shows you humans and animals. Zoom out even further than it
shows you planets, stars, and eventually the size of the observable
universe.
That's huge.
In minutes you can compare the size of a person to a bacteria and the united states to the moon, and our sun to the galaxy.
There
are many fantastic applications for this tool, but the one I used was
this: Look at all the important things smaller than an inch. At some
point fractions of an inch become too complicated and fail you. Miles
are even worse. Try using miles to measure the distance to Alpha
Centuri, our nearest star, and the numbers are truly astronomical. No,
the metric system is shown to be useful because the same measurement is
used for all of these things and it works.
Good hunting!
Comments