The Lending Museum · ages 9-14

The Boat and the Elephant

The idea: a floating boat sinks to the same line for the same weight.

Lan and Beto look at a little wooden boat with a carved elephant inside, at the museum loan desk with Ledger.

Read it

Who is in this book

Ledger No object leaves without a slip that says what you saw, before what you think from BackstageQuest
Cup A floating boat sinks to the same line for the same weight from MeasureQuest
Lan a child of the Green Goes first; makes a friend in a minute
Tare Weigh the thing, not the bowl from MeasureQuest
Beto a child of the Green Takes things apart

Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.

The Honest Page

Which parts of this story are true, stretched or made up?

True

In Vietnam a story is told that the scholar Lương Thế Vinh (born 1441) weighed an elephant for a Ming envoy by floating it on a boat, marking the waterline and loading stones to the same mark. Source
In China the same method is told of the boy Cao Chong, more than a thousand years earlier. Source
A floating boat pushes aside its own weight of water, so the same load always sinks it to the same line. Source
420 grams with the bowl, take away an 80-gram bowl, leaves 340 grams.

Stretched

The two scholars weighed an elephant this way. What we simplified: Both are legends, told in two countries. Nobody knows if either really happened. The mathematics holds either way.

Made up

The Lending Museum, the boat model and the toy elephant are made up. Ledger, Cup and Tare come from BackstageQuest and MeasureQuest.

Tell it back

Tell the story in your own words: who was there, what went wrong, and what they found out. Then a paper loan slip with the museum's date stamp, the first in the children's folder goes on your belt.

Ring the hammer for someone

Pick this book for someone younger. The link carries only the book, and it will wait for them on the Green.

Across the Table → For the grown-up: the story in three lines, one question to ask, and one thing to do together.