How do you measure 6,000,000?

After watching Paperclips for the first time, I knew I must use it with my students. Eighth graders at Whitwell Middle School in a rural Tennessee town decided to intensly study the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, 6,000,000 Jews were killed. Five million more people, including homosexuals and gypsies, were exterminated as well. A class discussion sparked a question from a student: what is 6,000,000? I've never seen it. What does it look like? The students then went on a quest to find objects suitable for collecting on a massive scale. This is what they found.

During the time of the Holocaust, Norwegians attached paperclips to their shirt collars to protest the treatment of the Jews. On discovery of this, students and teachers at the small middle school decided to collect 6,000,000 paperclips to better understand what exactly 6,000,000 means.

I'm not going to spoil the whole movie for you -- you're just going to have to rent it and watch it for yourself -- but they ended up with donations from all of over the world, over 29,000,000 paper clips, and over 25,000 personal accounts behind the donated paperclips.

So how do you measure 6,000,000? Here's a clue.

6,000,000 seconds = 100,000 minutes = 1,666.67 hours = 69.4 days = 9.9 weeks

6,000,000 sheets of paper = 12,000 reams

6,000,000 book pages (averaging 200 pages per book) = 30,000 books

6,000,000 magazines (at 12 a year) = 500,000-year subscription

6,000,000 pounds of people (averaging 150 pounds per person) = 40,000 people

6,000,000 minutes of music (averaging 3.5 minutes per song) = 1,714,283 songs = 142,857 CDs (with 12 songs per CD)

6,000,000 ounces of soda = 500,000 cans = 41,666 12-packs

6,000,000 inches = 500,000 feet = 94.5 miles

6,000,000 pennies = $60,000 dollars

6,000,000 pringles chips = 70,588 cans of pringles

6,000,000 slices of pizza = 750,000 pizzas, enough to serve over 2,000,000 people

How do you measure 6,000,000?