Capacity: Interactive Math Notebooks

Capacity is always fun!  Unfortunately, when moving to our new building, all the containers I had saved for this day were tossed thinking it was trash!  Can you believe it? Someone thought our old milk cartons and jugs were trash!  Anyway, I'm lucky to have a mom who also teaches 5th grade math (you should hear our phone conversations....very animated!) and because she had taught capacity the week before, she was willing to lend me her collection.  Saved by mom (again!).  After a lot of spilled water and "do you predict this container will hold two or three of these?" we moved into our notebooks to record our thoughts.

First, we wrote down the Big G.  Why didn't we have this when I was a kid??  I never remembered what the Gallon Bot was and it was way too difficult to recreate, but the Big G is EASY!  It's truly how I remember my conversions.  Here is a picture:

Next, I gave them a moment to free write.  I really wanted them to write down everything they knew about capacity, so each student's page is very different, but many chose to write down conversions based on the Big G.  I walked around making sure that they understood how to read it.  Here is one example:

Of course, there's also an anchor chart hanging in our room of the Big G that we refer to often, but I didn't feel the need to post it here because it is the same as the notebook page :)