I want to show a classromm of 6th graders what one billion of something looks like. Any suggestions?

Question

I was thinking along the lines of grains of sugar, sand...something cheap and easy to find.

I was thinking of grains of sugar or sand...something very cheap and easy to find. If anyone knows the weight of a grain of sand or sugar I could go from there. I want this to be something that they can see in the classroom. Thanks!

Answer 1

Dry beans or peas.

Answer 2

How about a grain(s) of sand or salt crystals. Something cheap, easy to carry around, and something they can relate to in regular day to day life whether at home or at play. There will also be more math involved as far as volume goes. Calculating how much sand/salt in a square inch then find out how many square inches it would take to make a billion. Here's one-What about a Google (1 followed by 100 "0's")? Now that's a lot of zeros

Answer 3

yes i would use sand . show them one grain two grains and so on . then if you have a very good scale measure off about 200 grains . then find a rock that is the same weight. teach them that math all math lacks in every answer one thing .
one plus one does not equal two if you are truthful .
one plus one will equal one . or 3 or more but never two.
the element that is missing is time.
time is present in all things . hence the rock this is one way time has affected math. then show them a picture of a beach tell them how the sand and time turned as little as one rock into a billion or more grains of sand.
you may just turn a class room of children from little robots who memorize into great thinkers.
dont worry you can teach them basic math and all the little numbers and things just as they have learned so far by just having them answer one plus one equals two if time if left out.

Answer 4

Go online and type into googly/yahoo images "one billion AND objects". If you want hands on visuals then sugar might be the best idea (but VERY hard to count hehehe). You can also take a voluteer and mix science in with your session and talk about the billlions of cells in a human.

Answer 5

Sugar or flour is a great idea. What about a glass of water, you could say it is molecules of water. The sugar is probably better for them, it wwould give them a better prospective idea because they could actually SEE the individual grains.

Answer 6

good luck counting out one billion grains or sand... i would use paper, and cut it into 2-inch or 1-inch squares. It wouldnt use up a lot of paper and you would get a lot of squares out of one sheet. That would be easier to count because you would just count the amount of squares in one sheet and then divide 1 bilion by it and that would give you the number of sheets of paper you will need to cut up.

Answer 7

Does your school have a library ? I know that it wont have enough books with pages equalling a billion but if you're close to A big library when they see all those books ,maybe they will realize how huge a Billion is.

Answer 8

use beans or pennies. When i was in school we all had to bring in 5 pennies a day and then record them on a paper, untill we reached 1 billion. After that we all had the joy or donating them to some charity or the school or somthing!!
Good Luck!!!

Answer 9

What some of our local classes did was to save gallon milk jugs. Then they saved the tabs from alumium can and saved until they got there certain amount. Then the tabs when they were finished were turned over to help the Ronald McDonald house

Answer 10

Hmmm...a good one for one million is the math that shows if you paid Jesus a dollar a day from the time he was born to today, he would not have a million dollars. Can you modify that somehow for a billion?

Answer 11

One billion of something, looks like the ant colonies in the Amazon jungle.