This morning we created our own units of measurement and pasted them to a "ruler". Students named their units and broke them down into fractional parts. We used the units to measure three items and recorded our data in our science and math journals. Once we measured our items, we then glued the units to the ruler.
The book "Teaching Student-Centered Mathematics" by John A. Van de Walle, is a great resource that focuses more on conceptual understanding of content, rather than only procedural computations. The book includes many hands-on tasks where students discover how to arrive at an answer and the process really shows their true understanding of the concept. We use these types of tasks and have "Number Talks" where students explain how they arrived at an answer. It's great to hear their different explanations and how they got their answers and we all learn from each other!