Math Beyond Workbooks

How Big is a Million?

• skills involved: number sense, estimating, problem solving, the four basic operations, measurement/unit conversion, and more


• materials needed: depend upon what students choose to measure, along with poster board, markers, and calculators

The following activity is fun, interesting, and loaded with math.

1. Have students work in pairs.



2. Each pair will be measuring a million of something. They can decide together what they would like to measure. For example:



• How many liters/cups is a million drops of water?
• How many days would it take to count to a million if you say one number each second?
• If you lived a million days, how old would you be?
• If you line up a million pens end to end, how many miles would this be?
• How much would a million pennies weigh?



3. After making a guess as to what the answer to their question will be, students conduct experiments and calculations to find out. For example, if they want to figure out how many liters will be filled by a million drops of water, they can use an eye dropper and count the number of drops in a centiliter, for example, multiply by 100 to get the number of drops in one liter, and divide 1,000,000 by this number to calculate the number of liters. Encourage them to work together to come up with a plan for solving their problem before they begin.



4. Have each pair make a poster of their results, with their question on the top, an explanation of how they figured it out (along with illustrations), and the answer. They can share/present to the rest of the class.