One Grain of Rice

One Grain of Rice by Demi

Illustrated by Demi

Recommended Grade Level: 5th grade

NCTM standards: Number and Operations, Algebra

This book tells the story of a selfish raja who forced the peasants in his town to give all the rice that they grew to him except for just enough for them to live off of. He said he was storing the rice in his royal storehouses so that they could have rice to eat if there was a famine. One day, there was a famine in this village and the raja did not want to give rice to his peasants fearing that he himself would starve. Along came a peasant girl named Rani who noticed that rice was leaking out of one of the bags being carried to the royal storehouses. She collected the rice in her dress and instead of keeping the rice for herself she returned the rice to the raja. He was grateful to her and asked her if he could do anything for her in return. She replied that he could give her one grain of rice, and the next day double that, and the next day double that, and so on for 30 days. The raja thought this was a very modest request. Over the course of 30 days, Rani was given all the rice in the raja's royal storehouses and she gave it to the peasants so that no one would go hungry and made the raja promise that from now on he would only take as much as he needed.

If I were teaching this book I would ask students to make predictions about how much rice Rani would be receiving on the 30th day and how much rice she would be accumulating over all. Students could make estimations and then actually calculate how much rice she would be receiving and see how far off their predictions were from the real numbers. I would also challenge students to come up with a mathematical formula to figure out how much rice Rani would be receiving on the 30th day and overall so that students wouldn't have to multiply times 2 over and over again.