Toilet paper conjures up a wild range of images, from potty jokes to memories of TP’ing houses at Halloween. Well, at Crazy 8s kids saw that toilet paper also invokes math!
Toilet paper squares are conveniently about 4 inches long, so every 3 squares make 1 foot. Kids used that fact to measure items and convert from squares to feet. In doing so, they practiced their multiples of 3 without even noticing. Then they competed in Olympic events such as the long jump, using toilet paper to measure their game-winning distances!
You can continue the fun at home, if you’re willing to unroll some snakes of toilet paper:
- Go big and measure a room or even your whole living space with toilet paper. Find the length and width of the space in feet, then multiply to figure out how many square feet of carpet you’d need to fill the room.
- Find the distance around hard-to-measure objects like a couch. Just wrap it in one loop of TP, then count the squares and do the math magic.
- If it’s nice out, unroll a REALLY long strip of toilet paper and see how far your kid can hurl a whole roll. As parents speaking from experience, somehow kids can throw that thing way farther than you think.
