How big was the Ark, really?  (Noah’s Ark — as in, the big boat — not the Ark of the Covenant)  We can read about it, but it just doesn’t fully sink in.  (At least it never did for me.)  For one thing, it’s in cubits.  We don’t think in cubits.  But even if you convert the measurements to feet, it still can be hard to really picture.  Unless you use comparisons to more familiar things to visualize it.

(No one knows for certain how long a cubit was.  It probably varied depending on who was doing the measuring.  But the general consensus is that it was approximately 18 inches, so that’s the conversion we’ve used in our activities.)

1. How big was the ark? Walk It

We got this idea from Bible Road Trip.  I can’t remember for sure if it suggested pacing off the Ark, or if it suggested pacing off the Temple, and I took the idea to use for this.  (The book recommended one and I decided to do both, but I don’t remember which was the original.)

We sent the kids out to the street (we have a safe, low-traffic street!) and had them measure the length, width, and height of the Ark, marking it with sidewalk chalk.  (They didn’t measure the height upward in this exercise, obviously.  They just measured the distance that would equal the height.)  We were amazed to discover that the length of the Ark would take up almost our full street!  (It’s a fairly short street, so if you live on a long street your mileage will vary, of course.)

I have no pictures of this, because we have a slight hill and we could literally not see from one end to the other!

This was a very enlightening project, for all of us.

2. How big was the ark? Build It

The second thing we did is build this model Ark from Tell It Publishing.  It’s a simple model — which is good, because even my 7-year-old could do it (mostly*) on her own — but it’s to scale, so it gives a great visual of the Ark’s proportions.  (No unseaworthy tub here!)

*She needed help scoring the folds.

(The model is what you see in the photo at the top of the post.)

3. How big was the ark? Graph It

Now this is where it really got interesting.  We were blown away by how huge the Ark was.  We were even more blown away when we realized what else is actually bigger than the Ark.  By a lot.

We chose a selection of items to measure, or locate measurements for, and Ariel outlined them, to scale, on graph paper.  (I use the term “outlined” loosely.  We were going for more of a graph-like effect than technical drawings.  They’re just rectangles.)  The measurements are estimated/rounded in a few cases — we didn’t worry with stray inches and such — but they’re pretty close.

Here you see the footprints of each item:

That itty-bitty red rectangle is our car.  The next smallest one is our house.  The purple box is a Boeing 757 (along with Mama’s not-so-great drawing, because it just looked weird to show an airplane as a rectangle).  Then, extending to the right, we have a football field, the Ark (the long, skinny one), skipping over the dotted line and going on to the end, the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.  (It isn’t actually a rectangle, but this shows its total length and width.

The really amazing one, for us?  The one with the dotted line.  That’s a Nimitz-class air craft carrier.  Except it was too large to fit on even this doubled sheet of paper, so this diagram only shows half of it!

Then there is the height of each item:

From left to right, we have: the Ark, the Air & Space Museum, our car, Boeing 757, our house (I think – looks like she forgot to label that one), and an air craft carrier.  (Note that the width on these is not to scale.  Their heights are merely displayed bar graph-style.)

Want to know what’s really amazing, in terms of height?  The Freedom Tower would be almost 3-1/2 pages tall at this scale.

Ariel cleverly opted to make her drawings the same scale as the Ark model (12 feet = 1/4 inch).  That makes these somewhat interactive, for an even fuller visual.

We have a much better grasp of the size of the Ark (and a greater appreciation for certain other engineering accomplishments, as well) after these activities!