I came up with this activity to teach the metric system to my gifted students. The problem centers around Taylor Swift going on tour and requiring some information from my students. You could definitely change the artist to someone more popular with your group of kids.
I posed the problem to them by having them read the situation titled "A Diva's Crisis." Then, they were assigned to groups and brainstormed a list of questions to put in the "W" section of a KWL chart (a teacher answer key is