For instance, a foot...is basically a foot length. So there's this foot-measuring waddle some people do walking literally heel-to-toe to get a general sense of the space. An inch is kinda a finger width, etc (they're all not perfect by any sense).
I've decided to just take the plunge and basically re-learn all my measurement systems because I'm seeing less and less of those being used. I started with just memorizing all the conversions but that's literally just adding another step. Everything I own basically has settings to switch or show both measurements (like tape measures) so I'm just going to stop using Fahrenheit and the United states "Customary System" all together.
Any tips or things you're taught or pick up on? There's a funny primary school poem for conversion of customary liquid measurements,
Land of Gallon
Introducing capacity measurement to learners can be challenging. To make this topic more accessible and memorable, we can integrate creative and interactive activities into our teaching approach. Using storytelling, we can transform the sometimes daunting task of learning measurement conversions into a whimsical tale.
- In the Land of Gallon, there were four giant Queens.
- Each Queen had a Prince and a Princess.
- Each Prince and Princess had two children.
- The two children were twins, and they were eight years old.
Once students are familiar with the story be sure they see the connection between the story characters and the customary units of capacity measurement. If necessary, label the story pieces with their corresponding units of measure: queen = quart, prince/princess = pint, children = cups, 8 years old = 8 fluid ounces. You can reduce the number of customary units in the story based on student readiness. link
tl;dr looking for anything to remember the hierarchy and memorizing the metric and Celsius measurement system, sometimes explained in schooling or local sayings. (if I had an example for those systems I would give one lol).
I don't think there are many things to help, really, except for memorizing some basic stuff.
Like, learn how large is 10 cm and you can derive pretty much any usual length from that. 1 meter? Ten times ten cm. And so on. For larger distance units I recommend using a GPS navigation and set the units to metric. When the GPS tells you "in 200 hundred meters turn right" you'll slowly associate a real distance with that number. And as before, the math is easy: 1 km is 5 times 200 meters.
Same with everything, find something where you can associate something you know (how large is that that cup of soda I'm drinking) with a number (it's 200 ml). Afterwards it's really easy to calculate because that's what metric was made for. So, if you memorize that your cup has 200 ml, one liter is easy - it's 5 times that.
For temperature, you'll have to memorize some important numbers. 0° water freezes, 100° it boils, human body 36.6° (or 36.5° for ease of remembering, the difference is not that important), comfortably warm room temperature is 20°, 25° it gets rather hot, though still manageable, 30°C gets uncomfortable, 35° is really hot, 40° is hell. Remembering in increments of 5° helps, eventually you'll get a feel for 22° being somewhere between 20 and 25 and what exactly that translates to.