Measurement Fun

Today is my first day back after Spring Break. April Fools--the first day back?  Yes, I'm not joking.
so I decided to start the day with a little fun--with non-standard units of measurement as our next Math unit, I had just the thing.

First I began with a cute little story Called How Big is a Foot?

It's a cute little story about a King who wants to give his Queen a present that she doesn't have. It incorporates the idea that not all feet are the same and how the Standard unit of a Foot came to be.

Next, we tested this theory and we ALL, me included, traced our feet. You can see them in our chart here.

After we took some time to order our feet from Smallest to biggest, we talked about how this might be a problem when measuring things in real life.
I then, gave each student a mustache that I cut using Mustache border from Creative Teaching Press.
I mustached them to measure a few different items and record it in their notebooks.

 Pardon my horrible drawing of the mustaches.  But, that being said, I demonstrated how to use the mustache to measure and move it along the length of an item.

At the end of the lesson, I asked the class to turn their mustache over and write what they had learned. Voila! non-Standard units of measurement fun!