Measuring Noah's Ark

Today we finished week 4 in our TOG year 1. Our theme this week was Creation through Noah's ark. What an interesting week! Today, we went to a park with several soccer fields and lots of open space so that we could measure the actual size of the ark. WOW! It was huge! I thought I had a good picture in my mind of how big it was, but it was much larger than I thought.

Picture Joel, Ivy, and I each holding an 18 inch of twine (one cubit). We stood next to each other with our twine strings touching. We put a lid of a rubbermaid container at our starting spot. The person on the end moved to the other end and so we counted all the way to 300 cubits to measure the length of the ark! It took a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time and I know we looked VERY odd and peculiar! We had a small crowd of people watching us from a distance wondering about such weird homeschoolers and what in the world we were doing!

We then put down another lid to mark the corner and measured 50 cubits for the width. By then Jaden about had it with us! "Stop counting!!!" "No more counting please!!!!! I want to go to the playground!!!!!!" This was a very long activity - litterally. It takes a long time to do this and it's a long area to cover! Of course, we could have used another method to measure out 450 feet (300 cubits) by 75 feet (50 cubits) but the point was to do it cubit by cubit. And it made us understand how it would have taken over a hundred years for Noah to build that thing! The total square feet of the 3 floors of the ark would be about four and a half football fields!

In the picture above, maybe you can strain your eyes to see two tiny little specks of red in the distance. Those are actually Joel and Ivy standing at each of the side corners of the "ark". I was standing oposite Joel at the other side of the "ark" when I took the picture.