Title: One Grain of Rice and Exponential Growth
Grade Level: 3-5
Drama/Theatre Standards Addressed:
Standard 1: Learn and develop the essential skills and meet technical demands unique to dance,
music, theatre/drama and visual arts.
K-5 Benchmark 1A: Use body and voice to portray character.
Standard 2: Use dance, music, theatre/drama and visual arts to express ideas.
K-5 Benchmark 2A: Develop classroom dramatizations that express various moods or emotions
(e.g., happy/sad, funny, scary, mysterious, etc.).
Standard 4: Demonstrate an understanding of the dynamics of the creative process.
K-5 Benchmark 4A: Collaborate to design, plan, rehearse and perform dramatizations.
Math Core Content Standards Addressed:
Operations and Algebraic Thinking
Grade 3
• Solve problems involving the four operations, and identify and explain patterns in arithmetic.
Grade 4
• Use the four operations with whole numbers to solve problems.
• Generate and analyze patterns.
Grade 5
• Analyze patterns and relationships.
Number and Operations in Base Ten
Grade 3
• Use place value understanding and properties of operations to perform multi-digit arithmetic.
Grade 4
• Generalize place value understanding for multi-digit whole numbers.
Grade 5
• Understand the place value system.
• Perform operations with multi-digit whole numbers and with decimals to hundredths.
Measurement and Data
Grades 3, 4, 5
• Represent and interpret data.
Language Arts/Reading/Core Content Standards Addressed:
Key Ideas and Details
1. Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it;
cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.
2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key
supporting details and ideas.
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a
text.
Materials:
 One Grain of Rice by Demi
 Paper/pencils/calculators (if appropriate)
 Students arranged in 6 groups of 4 or 5 each
 Space for groups to work/present
Vocabulary: Famine, Raja, doubling numbers, exponential growth, scene, dialogue, improvise
Teaching Process:
 Discuss “doubling” numbers. If you double 1, you get 2. If you double 2, you get 4. If you double
4, you get 8…and so on for the first 10 steps—end up at 512. Ask students what they notice.
 Read One Grain of Rice. Stop after the scene where Rani receives two bags of rice—32,768
grains of rice.
 Explain to the groups that they will retell scenes from the story. The dialogue between characters
will be improvised but will need to reiterate what happened in the scene.
 NOTE: Choose one group aside who will take the final scene and read to them the story
from day 29 and on. This group will retell that scene to the end of the story.
 Distribute papers/pencils/calculators. Have each group calculate from 32,768 (day 16) how many
grains will be received each day until day 30. Discuss results.
 Groups have time to rehearse their scene (3 to 5 minutes).
 Present scenes in sequence. Groups become the “audience” for each other.
 Debrief—thoughts, dramatic presentations, last scene, math involved, problems or rewards that
might come from a situation such as this.
Assessment: Discussion, teacher observation.
Modifications:
 Students work in pairs and do the calculations for all thirty days.
 Students begin with a Marilyn Burns activity called “Doing Dishes” from The I Hate Mathematics
Book. There is a on-line link www.themathlab.com/Pre-Algebra/basics/exponent.htm .
 Another way to play with the pattern that comes from the exponential growth is to play “Smart
Cards”, also from the I Hate Mathematics Book or find it here
http://approachinfinity.blogspot.com/2009/12/smart-cards.html
One Grain of Rice
by Demi
Scene 1
Characters: Raja, farmers, rice collectors
 The farmers grow the rice
 The Raja declares that they will give most of it to him
 The rice collectors come and take most of the rice
Scene 2
Characters: Raja, farmers
 A famine hits
 Raja gives no rice to the farmers
Scene 3
Characters: Raja, servant, Rani, Guard
 Raja orders a feast
 Servant brings an elephant and two baskets of rice
 Rani follows the elephant and catches falling rice in her skirt,
comes up with a plan
 Guard stops Rani, she returns the rice
Scene 4
Characters: Raja, ministers, Rani
 Raja asks ministers to bring Rani to him
 Raja tells Rani she has done a good thing, will be rewarded
 Rani describes how she would like to be rewarded
Scene 5
Characters: Raja, Rani, farmers
 Day 9
o Raja comments how Rani is not very clever—not getting a
lot of rice
 Day 16
o Raja recognizes the doubling is growing but doesn’t seem to
mind
 Day 30
o All the rice is gone from the storehouses, Raja asks Rani
what she will do with all the rice
o Rani tells how she will give it to the people
o Tells the Raja to only take what he needs in future
o Farmers rejoice