Happy Pi Day!

Archimedes would have been proud of us today! Our class celebrated Pi Day in full force, and it impacted many curricular areas. After a brief lesson about pi and the relationship between a circle's circumference and its diameter, it was time for Arts Ed. We made pony bead bracelets and, when finished, we wrote as many digits of pi as would fit around our wrists.

Next it was time for math, so we made "pi plates". We took regular paper plates and measured the circumference of them using yarn. This was trickier than we thought it would be. We marked the starting point for measurement and, in teenie, tinysections, inched our way around the plate. Then we took the length of yarn and measured it to the nearest millimetre using metre sticks.

Finding the diameter was considerably easier. We folded the plates as carefully as possible and measured across the center of the plates to the nearest millimetre. The students then took their circumference and divided it by their diameter (yes - we used calculators for this!) with the hopes of getting close to pi. Most students were able to fall within the range of 2.9... and 3.5... To our amazement, two students (pictured below) were able to calculate their quotient remarkably close to pi! Their responses were 3.141... and 3.147... Amazing!

In Daily Five, we worked on writing by creating characters from the pi symbol. Being a huge baseball nerd, I created Hall of Fame Mets catcher, Mike Pi-azza. The students came up with ridiculous ideas of their own! We had Broncos quarterback Pi-ton Manning, Pi-lots, Pi-rates, Sir Pi-saac Newton, and even a Pi-rannosaurus Rex! It was too much fun!

Then it was time to listen to reading, so I did a short read aloud of Cindy Neuschwander's amazing picture book, Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi. The students got all of the weird math jokes and we had lots of fun with the voices of the characters!

After such a great day of pi-related activities, it was time to have a little disconnected fun. Thanks to our awesome group of generous parents, we had lots of different pies to go around, complete with ice cream and whipped cream. The students literally gorged themselves on all of the delicious pies and we crushed 4L of vanilla ice cream! Apologies to all of the parents who had to hear their children say, "I'm not hungry. Math ruined my appetite!" ;)

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After: