One Grain of Rice

Today we read a book by Demi called One Grain of Rice. After reading this book which has 2 main characters, Alexandra and I took turns acting out the parts & being the narrator 6 times in a row! After that, I called it quits, but we will probably do it again tomorrow. :-)

The book is about a famine in India and how a girl "tricks" the raja to give her a lot of rice. She does that by asking him to give her 1 grain of rice the 1st day, double that to 2 grains the 2nd day, 4 the 3rd, etc. She asks him to do this for 30 days & he agrees. He has no idea how quickly the rice will multiply!

The acitivty we are doing which was suggested on a yahoo group is to take a bag of rice & start with 1 grain in a bowl, add 2 the next day, etc. We won't be doing it for 30 days, but we will do it until the bag of rice is gone. When it gets into higher amounts, we will use measuring cups or something to estimate how much rice needs to be added to our bowl.

Update: Day 6

Today was Day 6 on our rice project. We now have 63 grains of rice in our bowl and it still doesn't seem like much. It's hard to believe that if we did this for 30 days we'd have over 1 trillion grains of rice!!!

We're keeping a chart which is a wonderful math lesson. Alexandra is helping me to double our "# added" to find out how many to add that day. And, she's helping to add to find out our "total" for the day.