Then we talked about ways to write numbers. I wrote a collection of numbers on the driveway and the kids told me when I was writing "new" numbers. They caught me at 102. Yep I wrote the number 100 in a silly way they told me once I explained the number. We kept going and we discussed 3x104 and they began to see the simplicity of exponential notation.
With those two concepts, we can proceed to Small Numbers. We broke the driveway into sections 10 meters long. Each child or team then divided their section up 10 pieces. I had a little worksheet to go along with this activity where they wrote down how many deci-driveways they made (101) and how much of their total driveway section was in each deci-driveway (10-1). Then we took one deci-driveway and broke it onto 10 pieces - centi-driveways. Do you see how I introduced measurement, ratios, and SI unit prefixes? We went one step further to milli-driveways and that was hard enough to mark in thick sidewalk chalk.
At this point we stepped inside to the microscope, Powers of Ten movie clip, and a number ordering activity. We have a microscope with a magnification of up to 400x and lots of prepared slides. I also made available a scale bar (aka clear ruler with mm markings) so they could really see how big the microscope made things look. Those mm markings are huge through the objective lense! Powers of Ten is a famous (in physics circles) film which takes a couple picnicking by the lake in Chicago and changes the field of view by a power of ten every 4 seconds or so. The distance covered go larger than galaxies and smaller than the nucleus of an atom. This film showed the kids things they can't see in everyday normal life. The last activity was to arrange a set of cards with the numbers in order. There were 5 sets and the numbers got progressively more challenging to order because they got smaller and were written in exponential notation (which is larger 3x10-2 or 3x10-3?).
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