22. Teaching and Celebrating Pi Day

Ellie 0:05

What's the first thing you think of when you hear Pi Day? If you're like my daughter who works in a bakery, your first thought might be about pie pickup day at Thanksgiving time. That's a huge day for them. But that's not the kind of pie we're chatting about today. Welcome to the teaching Toolbox Podcast. I'm Ellie, and I'm here with Brittany.

Brittany 0:42

Hello.

Ellie 0:43

And today we're going to chat about Pi Day, and the incredible part that circles play in our lives.

Brittany 0:50

Ellie 1:33

So pi is a special ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. Circumference, which is the distance around a circle is equal to pi times diameter, which is the distance across the circle going through the center. Archimedes, a Greek mathematician, was the first to write about finding this ratio. He discovered that regardless of the size of the circle, that ratio was constant, he performed his mathematical experiment with a variety of polygons and found that the more precise he got, the closer his figure got to 22 sevenths fraction 22 sevens because they didn't have decimals in ancient Greece.

Brittany 2:17

Ellie 3:33

Wow, that's an interesting stuff. And that's some great stuff to share with our students on Pi Day. These can be some things that we talk about with students. If you're interested in celebrating more things with Pi in your classroom, there are many ways you can approach the day. So if you haven't studied circles yet, or the relationship between circumference and diameter, you might want to spend Pi Day giving students the chance to explore. And like the old mathematicians discover the relationship on their own. You could use a variety of different objects that are circles, they could be food items, like cookies, or donuts, or pies if you're allowed to use food, or they could be objects like coins, Frisbees, CDs, the base of a cylinder, which might actually be easier to measure, or even just circles cut from paper. And so using some tape measures and rulers, you can have students measure and record the circumference and the diameter of each of the circles. Now, if you don't have tape measures, because maybe some of us don't have tape measures in the classroom, students could use length of string and use the string to measure the circumference. Mark that measurement on the string and then go ahead and measure the length of the string. So they just have to be very careful to make sure they're as accurate as possible with that,

Brittany 4:54

once they're done measuring, have them divide the circumference the length of that string or whatever they are using to measure by the diameter for each of those circle measurements, you can record the students data so everyone can see it, use a chart if you can, and then take time to discuss the results. Hopefully enough, students will measure carefully enough to get close results to 3.14. And students will be able to notice that the answer is about 3.14. No matter how big or small the circle is. But if the results aren't all that close, it's a good opportunity to talk about what might have caused the results to be less accurate. And you could wrap up the class with reading the book, service or conference and the dragon of pie.

Ellie 5:44

Sounds like a great discovery activity. I have done with that with my students. And I once had a student teacher who did something similar. And she also used that book Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi, and the students really enjoyed it .that was a great activity.

So maybe you have some other things that you would like to do for Pi Day. And so we've got a bunch of quick ideas for you. You might do Pi Day centers, or station activities where you could include different crafts or art projects,

Brittany 6:17

you might play some dice games that involve pie and dividing.

Ellie 6:22

You could make circles with Spirograph, I don't know about you, did you use Spirograph when you were young,

Brittany 6:27

I love the Spirograph. That was so much fun.

Ellie 6:30

Yeah, and my daughter actually bought that for me for Christmas one year. So you could work on making circles with Spirograph,

Brittany 6:36

you could have a competition or students memorize the digits of Pi and see who could memorize the most,

Ellie 6:43

you could have students write a piem,

Brittany 6:46

that is where you try to write a poem, but it has the same amount of letters in each word, based on the digits in pi. So the first word has to have three letters in it, because the first digit of pi is three, the second word has to have one letter in it for the one, then four letters, then one, then five, then nine, then two, then six, and so on.

Ellie 7:18

That sounds challenging. That could take a while.

Brittany 7:20

It is quite challenging and quite fun. Yes,

Ellie 7:23

you could play card games,

Brittany 7:25

you could make a human circle to measure.

Ellie 7:28

And that sounds like fun, like you could go outside and make a giant circle of all the students and then measure the circumference of all the students, you'd have to have a really really big a string or tape measure something to measure around all of that and then measure the diameter. But that can be fun.

Brittany 7:46

Yeah, you could create some pi puns, some puns related to pi,

Ellie 7:52

you could use some inquiry activities to explore pi such as doing the Buffon's needle experiment, which I've never done.

Brittany 8:01

If you haven't heard of it, it's quite interesting. It involves needles or toothpicks, a piece of paper and a marker. And that is basically it predicts pie. It's quite fascinating.

Ellie 8:15

Awesome.

Brittany 8:16

You could play with Moebius strips. Again, those involve paper, two colored crayons, and a pair of scissors. And you can see what fascinating things can happen with circles.

Ellie 8:29

Awesome. That's great that some of these don't really require a lot of materials.

Brittany 8:34

Yes,

Ellie 8:35

you could look at the relationships of parallelograms to circles.

Brittany 8:39

You could complete a Color by Number regarding the expression for pi, or students have to solve pi expression problems. And then color the color by number based on those problems.

Ellie 8:53

You could have a round table buffet,

Brittany 8:56

it's delicious. have oranges, cookies, grapes? Just lots of things made with round.

Ellie 9:04

Maybe some pies.

Brittany 9:05

Maybe some pies. Yeah. Did you know that Village Inn are there Village Inns by you?

Ellie 9:12

Is that at a restaurant?

Brittany 9:13

Yes. It's a little... it's a restaurant that it's usually open 24 hours a day.

Ellie 9:18

No, there was one something called I think the Village Inn around here but I don't think that's the same thing.

Brittany 9:23

We have Village Inns and they're open 24 hours a day. And they make pies. But they serve like all types of food. But on Pi Day, they give away little like self serving pies.

Ellie 9:39

Cool.

Brittany 9:40

If you request one.

Ellie 9:41

That's awesome.

Brittany 9:42

There are many other great ideas that you can do on Pi Day involving crafts and arts and exploration with numbers. exploration with inquiry. You just got to search things out. Stations, rotations centers are great ways to celebrate pi.

Whether you want to go all out with a big Pi Day celebration, or just work some new pi facts into your day, Pi Day can be a great day to spend time celebrating math and learning more about circle related concepts. Hopefully, you'll be able to fit some Pi day activities into your day on Pi Day this year.

If you'd like to read about any of the ideas we talked about, you can check out Brittany's blog posts about Pi Day. She's got so much great information in there and we'll link to those in the show notes.

We hope this episode gave you a few new ideas that you can add to this aspect of your teaching toolbox. We'll see you next time.

See you later.