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| People have a hard time understanding large
numbers. When I asked fourth graders how long it
would take to spend a million dollars or how
long it would take to count to a million, they
tended to guess a very short amount of time. To
help them understand how much a million is, have
one student count as fast as he or she can for
one minute. Divide 1,000,000 by that number to
find out how many minutes it would take. Divide
that number by 60 to find out how many hours,
etc. Another activity is to spend $1,000,000. Have the students get a catalog or online source of toys or electronic games and fill in the Excel worksheet attached above. Keep track of the time spent. My first time doing this was with fourth graders in 1982, well before schools had computers. We used paper and pencil and Sears and Penney's catalogs. After 1/2 hour, we added the total the class spent and found that they spent $21,000. At that rate, it would have taken them almost 24 hours to spend $1,000,000. During their free time, the kept spending money. After a few weeks, a student asked if he could buy a ranch for 3 1/2 million. That ended the spending spree. |