Noach’s Teyvah/Ark, Math and Autumn – How are they connected?

How could KDH children visualize the length of Noah’s Ark? 

It was 300 amot, approximately 600 feet long. 

At circle time, we started with a 12” ruler and yarn. We wrapped yarn around the ruler, up and down 100 times, until we had 100 feet of yarn.

To keep the yarn from getting tangled we wrapped it around a puppet. The children found that intriguing, On Friday morning we took the puppet and yarn and walked in front of the school. Morah Chana held onto the end of the yarn and the children followed Morah Ruth up the block as we unrolled the yarn. We had passed four houses. We estimated that every four houses is about 100 feet. We knew we needed to walk another 500 feet to reach 600 feet. That would be walking past twenty more houses, four houses/one hundred feet times five. The children were very excited to keep walking up the block. We walked and walked and at 600 feet reached almost the top of Cooledge Avenue. That was a HUGE teyvah/ark!  We counted our steps on the way back to school and counted over 300 steps.

Not ones to miss any opportunity, the children stopped in front of one house and collected small acorns and put them in a jar in our classroom. On Monday morning, we looked at the jar and the children guessed how many acorns we had collected. We spilled them out onto the carpet and arranged them in piles of five acorns each. We then counted by five. We had collected 138 acorns! 

By Morah Ruth - KDH