Measurement Worksheets

Reading temperatures from a thermometer is one of those everyday skills that is transferable to other situations. Sure, students could just ask their smart device about the temperature, but that only tells them the temperature at the nearest weather station, not where they're standing. Wouldn't it be more exciting to look at a thermometer in their own yard? And what if they are working at a solar power farm (or elsewhere) in the future and have other meters and gauges to read? Their skill in reading thermometers will help introduce them to negative numbers and be useful for reading other types of meters and gauges in the future.

Millions of people live near the U.S./Canada border, so it is inevitable that once in a while, those people are going to hear or see the temperature in a less familiar unit. Perhaps traveling to another country has one baffled about the forecast. Having a knowledge of some simple equivalents (like the freezing point is 0 degrees Celsius and 32 degrees Fahrenheit) and the ability to convert between C and F will not only help in determining the temperature in a familiar form, but will also help students build math skills that are useful in other situations. The temperature conversion guide gives a summary of the formulas used and some whole number equivalents to learn. There are several practice sheets for converting from °C to °F, from °F to °C, and a couple with both conversions mixed up.

Measuring length is so much more interesting if you can send students out with rulers and have them measure items in their environment. What is the width of the textbook? the classroom? the school? Have you ever met a student who didn't enjoy using a measuring wheel (you know the one that clicks every time you've traveled a yard or a meter)? How do you know they've measured things correctly though? Well, you might need something like we've provided below. You can also compare students' measurements of the same objects to see if they got the same measurement. Let's say, you had 20 students measure the height of the doorway. You should get 20 very similar answers (unless they are the sharing type then you'll get exactly the same answers) and any different answers can be quickly identified. IMPORTANT: When printing, select "Actual Size" or your measurements may be off.

Converting between Metric units is really an exercise in multiplying and dividing by powers of ten. Each of the converting worksheets in this section includes a "Conversion Line" that includes the prefixes, symbols and powers. It can be used to figure out how many "steps" are required to convert from one unit to another and what operation must be used. For example, when converting from millimeters to kilometers, students would determine that it takes six steps to the left in the direction of the division sign to get from milli to kilo on the conversion line. Depending on which method they are taught, this could involve dividing by 10 six times, dividing by 10⁶ or "moving the decimal" six places to the left. For squared units, each step counts as 100 or 10² and for cubic units, each step counts as 1000 or 10³. For more details, please see the Metric system conversion guide.

If they are available, full round protractors help students to recognize that measuring angles is the same as measuring sections of a circle. They also makes it much easier and precise to measure reflex angles.

Rectangles are fairly straight-forward polygons to measure since it is easy to find rectangles that use whole numbers. Rectangles are generally used when students first learn about perimeter and area and it is an opportune time to teach students that units are an essential part of any measurement. Without units, numbers are meaningless. Get your students into the habit of expressing all of their measurements with the correct units before they learn how to measure other polygons. Especially make sure they know that area is always expressed with squared units.

If a student is just starting to learn about perimeter and area, a few hands-on activities to learn the concepts is a good idea. Have them use square tiles to cover an area, have them paint a piece of paper and see how much paint is required. Create rectangles with straws and pipe cleaners and fill with square tiles to differentiate between perimeter and area. See if there are differently shaped rectangles that will hold the same number of square tiles.

If you want students to understand the triangle area formula, you might want to study parallelograms and rectangles first. Once students get how area is calculated for rectangles and parallelograms, they simply need to cut parallelograms and rectangles in half diagonally to get related triangles. They should quickly see that the area of a triangle is simply half of the area of the related quadrilateral.

The shapes are mixed up on the worksheets in this section. These area and perimeter worksheets would be best suited to students who have mastered finding the areas of triangles, rectangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids. For students who need an extra challenge, give them the compound shapes worksheet, but make sure they know how to find the area and circumference of a circle first.

Radius, diameter, circumference and area are all related measurements; you only need one of them to find the remaining measurements. Diameter and radius are the simplest ones because the diameter of a circle is twice the radius and, conversely, the radius is half the diameter. To calculate between radius/diameter and circumference/area, you need to use π (pi). Depending on your accessibility to calculators or computers, you may use many digits of pi in the calculation or just a few. Often, people without calculators use an estimate of pi (3 or 3.14). Just for fun we made a worksheet with pi to 100,000 decimal places. The calculations on the worksheets below use a fairly precise version of pi; you may have to adjust the answers if you use more rounded versions of pi.