As students settle in for the lesson, start by talking with your class about how it might feel to have a lot of money.
It’s pretty common for people to imagine what their lives would be like if they suddenly had more money than they could ever spend. People often say they would take a vacation, or buy a nicer house or car, or maybe give some of the money away. A few months ago, a single mom got the surprise of her life when she won a Powerball lottery prize of 344 million dollars.
- What’s the largest amount of money you’ve ever seen? (Answers may vary.)
- What would you do if you had that much money? (Allow students to fantasize and respond.)
That must have been really exciting when she won! Let’s see what she decided to do with part of the money.
Play the following video for your students [3:34]:
Ellen Meets Powerball Winner and Single Mom Lerynne West
Three hundred and forty-four million dollars is such a big number that it’s hard to really imagine. Let’s try to see if we can get a better idea of what that’s like. Invite students to gather in the front of the classroom, then pour out a small pile of pennies onto a table or desk. Each of these is worth just a single cent. But let’s pretend that instead of being ordinary pennies, these are super coins worth $100 each! To illustrate, stack several pennies on top of each other one by one, counting out loud in increments of $100.
Now, how high do you think we would have to make this stack of super coins to have $344 million? Place the small stack of pennies on a small table or chair beneath the whiteboard. Invite students to guess how high the stack would need to become by coming up and drawing vertical lines on the whiteboard with a dry erase marker. Once several students have drawn lines to show their guesses, reveal the truth: I’m afraid that this wasn’t a fair question, because this whiteboard isn’t quite big enough. Even if each of these pennies was worth $100, it would still take 3,440,000 of them to make $344 million. The stack would be almost three miles high!
Once students return to their seats, continue. With that much money, it might seem like you could do just about anything you wanted. But where would you start? Everyone would want you to help them with something; how would you choose who to help first? There are so many needs out there, you just wouldn’t be able to get to them all—even with $344 million.
In today’s lesson, we’re going to learn about Someone who really does have the power to help everyone. Let’s see what He did.
Source info:
Wolfram Alpha Result
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3.5+million+*+thickness+of+penny+%3D+%3F+miles
