One million dollars, 1 million people or a million acres. But really, how much is 1 million of anything?
The fourth-graders at Margaret Wills Elementary School have turned to the family of legumes to find out.
After two months of adding bean by bean by bean, they still haven't reached the halfway point.
"We thought it'd be really easy to collect 1 million," said Baylee Miller, 9. "Now we see how far we are from 1 million."
Fourth-grade math teacher Jeani Longstreth and her students were inspired by the book "How Much is a Million?" by David Schwartz.
Fourth-grade math includes working with large numbers, which can be a difficult concept for students, Longstreth said. Not only has the bean project sent students begging for beans to reach their goal, but it has given them a reason to count by twos, then by 10s and then by 100s.
"We have used multiplication to help us count the beans," said Devyn Klein, 9.
They can eyeball a bag with 300 beans or a bag with 1,000. "It took us six weeks to collect the first 70,000," Longstreth said.
She and her students realized at the rate they were collecting beans the fourth-graders would be in eighth grade by the time they reached 1 million, so the bean project now involves the entire school.
A bean barrel sits in the main hallway of Margaret Wills, near a thermometer that lets the student body know how close they are. Each Friday students learn a new tally.
A class at Palo Duro High School is building a container large enough to hold what will be 700 pounds of beans, Longstreth said. The container will remain inside Margaret Wills for future classes to see.
"We thought it'd be big giant barrels of little beans," Baylee said. "Instead we have three big boxes of 70,000 beans. We're on our fourth bucket. We already have like 300,000."
Amarillo Globe-News ©2015. All Rights Reserved.