My moosh often askes me questions about scale that stump me. Along the lines of "How big is the world to a germ?" Today she asked as we walked down the stairs of our building, "How much of a mile is it up to our flat?" Someone once told me that the street I grew up on was a quarter of a mile and that is the only reference I have in my head about what a mile looks like. I try to imagine our building lying on its side a the beginning of Strickland Drive. How many would fit? No that's no good. How much of the width of a typical front yard would it fill and how many houses are there on the street? No that doesn't help. Let's see, maybe each floor is 10 feet, and we are on the 3rd floor, so 30 feet, but I can't remember how many feet there are in a mile, is it 5000 something? But now we have to cross the parking lot and load kids and stuff into the car and I can't do that math in my head at the same time. As for germs and molecules, I'm not even sure I can imagine the magnitudes we're dealing with. I try to imagine what a million is: ten stacks of a ten by ten grid make in to one cube, and then ten stacks of a ten by ten grid of those cubes. Once I had her write the questions down, so that we could ask at the library about books that might answer them, but by the time we went to the library she'd lost interest again.
Does anyone know any good sources for these kinds of questions?
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3 comments:
perhaps an idea to buy a stepcounter? I am sure it could give many interesting thougts. How many steps a day? Or how many steps to the nearst foodstore? How many steps for a mile?
Just a thought.
Love Lisbeth
That's a cool idea.
You need a retracting 25' tape measure, a great tool. It's especially fun when two people are thinking and working together. And you were close: 5280 feet in a mile. But I looked it up online to be sure. :)
Love, Aunt Ann
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