During the 2009-2010 school year, my grade 5 class and I have taken on a project. In an effort to see how big one million really is, we began collecting bread tabs. Yes, those little plastic tabs that keep your bread bag closed and your bread from becoming rock hard. They don't take up a lot of space, they are light and everyone has them in their home at some point or another. They were most definitely the perfect object to collect to reach one million.
Even I, as a 41-year old educated adult, have a hard time wrapping my head around the enormity of one million. The number is tossed about frequently now with sports salaries, per episode salaries for actors and prizes in the weekly lotto, but it is still a huge number! I knew that my students really didn't have a good grasp of it's size and it was my job as a Grade 5 teacher to help them. Thus the project began.
When we began, my 26 kiddies were absolutely sure that we would have no problem collecting one million bread tabs in one year. After all, there were 26 of them, their families, the breakfast program and the hot lunch program of our small school all tucking away these tiny pieces of plastic. This would be a breeze. I never let on that I believed the project would remain incomplete in June.
The fun began right away. I brought in what I had squirreled away over the previous years to use as Bingo tokens and the lessons on place value began. "Okay boys and girls, begin by putting them in bunches of 10. How many tens do we need to make 100?" Quickly Ziploc snack bags became known as tens bags and sandwich bags became known as hundreds bags. We had slightly over 200 that day and did a quick lesson on regrouping in subtraction to find out how many more were needed to reach our goal. Positive attitudes still abounded.
Small baggies of bread tabs continued to trickle in. Every time our 2 litre ice cream bucket got filled, we had a counting class. "Ones" were stuck to a piece of duct tape, snack bags of "tens", sandwich bags of "hundreds" and, finally, a freezer bag of one thousand. These all got hung on the wall with our place value chart. Every time 10 smaller bags were filled a student announced that they needed a larger bag and regrouping was full speed ahead.
Since those early days there have been many interesting, funny and strange occurences with regards to our "little" class project. A colleague has encouraged me to jot them down and keep track of what happens between now and one million. I hope you enjoy the journey with us.
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