This is a lesson I devised in conjunction with an Eighth Grade Math Teacher. I was teaching Humanities (English/Socials) and I were were looking at world population. The students were, understandable, having difficulty trying to grasp what 7.8 billion people actually looks like, especially here in Canada where we don't have population density like that in New York, Tokyo, or Manilla. So, in true cross-disciplinary team teaching style, we collaborated and came up with this lesson. How do you conceptualize 1 Billion?

In this lesson, students are asked to visualize what 1,000,000,000 looks like! More than just a one with nine zeros after it... what does it look like in the world out there? First, there is the classic comparison to dollars, but that is equally abstract. Who has seen a billion dollars in front of them in paper bills rather than just a one and nine zeros on a computer screen or printout? So, then this lesson moves to a different comparator: time! Time is used first in terms of a billion seconds, then minutes, hours, days, and finally years. Let's go back into the past, and see where a billion of anything takes us!

The Task at the end of the lesson: Students are asked to take a household/school item and determine its length, area, or volume and then determine what one billion of those items would look like in the real world. Would they cover Texas? Fill the Grand Canyon? Wrap around the earth three times? Reach up to the moon and back?

Have fun with this lesson as you students will be able to bring a real understanding of what that number we so often now casually through out today, "one billion." Happy calculating!