Happy Pi Day
This year is the first time we have celebrated Pi Day! I am friends with several math teachers/math lovers on facebook and I always like seeing how they celebrate with their students. Micah is only 10 so he has not yet encountered 'pi' in his math curriculum. However, Noelle uses it and it seemed like a good time to jump in and make a fun day out of it! I searched online & came up with some good ideas.
Noelle suggested we 'each make a pie that expresses our personality.' While appreciating her enthusiasm I decided that she could make one & Micah could make one.
Noelle had a 'pumpkin cream' pie at her uncle & aunt's house in Texas, at Thanksgiving time, this past year. I'm not exactly sure what she had, but I found a pudding-type recipe and that is what she made. The decoration was her idea!
Recipe found here: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pumpkin-Cream-Pie/
Micah gets overwhelmed by sweets, so he decided that he wanted to make a chicken pot pie. Sidenote: He said a few funny things while he was making it. As he was chopping carrots & potatoes & cooking them & making the sauce he said, "Boy, cooking is a lot of work!" Then, when I grabbed a spatula for his to use he said, "Hey, I just washed that yesterday!" Then, when he was done he said, "I think I need to go lie down now!" He did the pi cut-out himself.
Recipe found here: http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/chicken-potpie-3
Baking pies is fun, but that doesn't really teach us much about math or pi though, so moving on~
I love Noelle's enthusiasm. She can bring a lot of energy and joy to us. This morning she completely surprised me by coming downstairs with a homemade Pi shirt & nerd glasses. I loved it!
We started our day with a Pi Day Workout! Kind-of a mini P.E. class for them. And me. But thankfully no one was taking pictures of me, because I really stink at burpees! (Pi Workout idea came from 'Skirt Sports'.)
We made a graph of the frequency of the first 100 digits of pi. We did a pi scavenger hunt. (Ideas from TeachersPayTeachers.) We watched several helpful youtube videos on the subject of pi. For Micah, de-mystifying math concepts is very important because otherwise he will get stuck. It was a perfect time to introduce him to the fact that 'pi' is just a symbol for a very special number. We also enjoyed our pie!!!
There is a great book, Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi by Cindy Neuschwander & illustrated by Wayne Geehan. We were able to get it through inter-library loan. We really took our time reading it so that the concept of circumference divided by diameter equals pi was fully understood. We also did a little activity to reinforce the concept. (Idea also from TeachersPayTeachers.)
When Micah was reading one of these worksheets that said '#5', instead of saying 'Number 5' he said 'hashtag 5'!! Oh, a sign of the times! Noelle said that she is Hermione and that I am Professor Snape because she is always raising her hand I am not calling on her! Because we did joint-things today, I did call on Micah more because I didn't want him relying on Noelle's knowledge, I wanted to make sure he was understanding what we were talking about. I do know that he grasped it because he was later able to demonstrate it with the maple trees we are tapping. Also, Micah making his chicken pot pie came right after we read this book. When he cut the carrots he cut a slice and showed me the circumference. Then he cut that slice in half and showed me the diameter. Then he cut that in half and showed me the radius.
And then of course we have a creative & an impish boy, which brings about things like this:
Next I had a couple of outside activites for the kids. Noelle figured out that this was really a way to get them to do some chores!! Most of our Pi learning today was about c x d = pi. However, I also talked about pi times r-squared = area of the circle. I challenged them to find the area of the trampoline....
....while shoveling off the heavy snow that we just got!
Micah found the area in inches & Noelle found it in feet. Then we talked about how it's not really square feet but cubic feet, as far as the snow shoveling is concerned.
(measuring the diameter.)
For one last activity we headed to the woods. Due to well over a foot of snow yesterday, my maple sap buckets looked like this:
I wanted to take the opportunity to clean the snow off my buckets. Plus, I do enjoy a good snowshoe through the woods with my kiddos.
You need to know the diameter of a tree in order to know how many spiles, (one, two, or three), you can use. What a great opportunity for us to put to practice what we have learned today! Now, it would be easy enough to make a very decent, good, and accurate estimate of the diameter. However, there was a purpose to this activity, and so we didn't estimate.
We did not bring a long enough tape measure! I won't go through the details of the math, but they had to measure the circumference of trees, divide it by pi, (they figured out that this is what they would need to do), to then find the diameter. Trees with a diameter greater than 25" can handle 3 spiles. This is a 3-spile tree!
Sources differ, but trees with a diameter of about 18 to 25 inches can handle 2 spiles. This is a 2-spile tree.
Ah, a little help please! This is the best producer that I have tapped right now. A sugar maple. It has 3 trunks & we have tapped two of them. Noelle measured this part of the trunk. She determined that it is definitely large enough to tap, (must be 10" in diameter to tap), but is well within the one-spile range, which is about 10-18".
Micah measured the other portion of the tree and had similar results.
That concludes our Pi Day celebration today. It was a lot of fun & hopefully if you stop my child and ask them about Pi they will be able to tell you at least something! :)
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