How Many Rabbits? (Sidetrack from bookwork)
How Many Rabbits? (Throwback from December 5, 2025)
December 27, 2025
Okay, this is a diversion from “real school” because we were watching some information about the Great Flood. Jillian and Lucas brought to my attention that if Noah was a good husbandman, he would have separated the males and females of the smaller more prolific creatures like the rabbit kind. If the rabbit kind was similarly prolific as they are today, one pair could cause the production of 266 kits in their ark tenure.
That took a fifteen-minute break from bookwork, researching the averages of rabbit kits, rabbit kind gestation (using the longest average time we found), rabbit kind sexual reproductive maturity (Jillian recalled the first baby Guinea Pig who was impregnated right after her first month! – and thereafter we started separating the piglets at 3 weeks), and random fun offshoots like “did you know xyz” about domestication of rabbits.
Yes, I did know that domesticated rabbits released in Australia are now the worst pest invasive species known. Like the Burmese Python is now the imported apex predator in the Everglades; responsible for the decimation of several native species. Jillian mentioned kudzu but Lucas returned their attention back to rabbits on the ark. (An internet of information can lead a reseracher down a cavern of unique information.)
We discussed how to verify information, how to check sources, how to make the search engine give you specific results, and other such research skills. Lucas learned about putting phrases in quotes, capitalizing the word “AND,” and tracing the references used by reputable authors.
All of this came while Lucas and Jillian were doing math books and Laud and Thea were watching The Greatest Adventure Stories from the Bible “Noah’s Ark.” So despite my two-year-old and six-year-old pointing out errors in a cartoon (“the camel and the dromedary are in the same kind,” “there’s no dinosaur kinds,” “there were seven of those animals,” etc,) because Jillian, Lucas, and I had been discussing the real versus playact for several Biblical-based movies in the van that morning, we are still using even a simple cartoon to expound on homeschool adventures!
Sign me up for all the directing and adding questions and encouraging them to stay on task, verify their results, and remember generations. Did you know that according to this theory of math experiment the two members of the rabbit kind could have seen their great-grandchildren exiting the ark? Hilarious theories popped out today. Then they settled back to “mundane” normal school math with apples, yards of fabric, and how much change of what kind does Mr. Smith have in his pocket. Lucas drew a battlefield on his scrap paper and attached numbers to the stick men. “What’s that?” I ventured. “Their offspring in one generation,” he gave a goofy grin, “how many generations since their war, mom?”
And how should I know since this is likely an unknown time in the French 100 years war?
“What year are they fighting?” I returned. He grinned but said nothing. I couldn’t help it, “subtract now from their year, divide by 25, and that gives you the average number of generations since their war.”
I love the random off-topic research to answer questions like “how many rabbits were on the ark?” This is another reason why I homeschool!
Hope this brightens your day! (or sent your elementary mathematicians racing to research and answer their own real-life equation that “is cooler than apples and orange and Mr. Smith’s change”)
Thank you for reading!
Type at you later!
~Nancy Tart
