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!" ;)

Before:

 

After:

 

Been there!

I am absolutely addicted to the Kid Snippet videos, but this one perfectly captures that feeling of trying to explain a math concept so many different ways that, in the end, everyone's confused!

Garbage Can Basketball

5 March 2013 - Today we took a short break from the textbook and practiced some hands-on work with fractions and decimals! We had one student away, which left us with a nice, round 25 students - an easy number to convert into 100.

Each student ripped four pages from a magazine and crumpled it up, giving us exactly 100 basketballs. I then placed a garbage can on a table at the from of the class and we were good to go. We each took 4 shots while seated at our desks, and 11 of the balls went in the bucket.

First, we wrote it as a fraction over 100. (11/100) The students then had to convert it to a decimal (0.11) and a fraction using a denominator of 1000 (110/1000) and a decimal value to the thousandths place (0.110).

Then, we established a foul line in the center of the class and the students took turns shooting four shots again. This time, 18 shots went in, so we wrote the same four values.

 

18/100 = 0.18 = 180/1000 = 0.180

Then we made it a little more challenging, each taking four shots from the back of the room. This time, only 2 went in.

2/100 = 0.02 = 20/1000 = 0.020

To finish up, Mr. C. (Grade 8 teacher) and I faced off, taking ten shots each. He hit 2, while I hit <cough> zero. The students calculated his results as:

 

2/10 = 20/100 = 0.2 = 200/1000 = 0.200

What a fun way to practice fractions and decimals!