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Anyone else having a Pi Day celebration on Thursday?


FaithManor
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The Geeks in this house are. I'm even allowing myself a rare treat - chocolate pie made with a rice flour based crust so I can eat some!

 

We are doing a bunch of mathematical, fun activities though most are high school level so I'm posting a link here to activities that would work for younger students.

 

Oh, we'll be celebrating Einstein's birthday as well. I'm making cut-out cookies...E = MC2.

 

I don't bake cookies at Christmas; I rarely make desserts except at Valentine's Day. Something about Pi Day just makes the geek in me get all giddy and then I do something crazy like this!

 

http://www.exploratorium.edu/pi/pi_activities/index.html

 

Faith

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Our co-op doesn't meet on Thursday, so my Geometry class is celebrating a day early tomorrow. And, for good measure, my Physics class will be celebrating Einstein's birthday, too.

 

Just in case anyone's interested, here are the stations I will have set up for Geometry:

 

1) Students will recite Pi to as many decimal places as they have memorized. The winner will receive a prize. Last year, I had two students who got into the 60-70 range. Most will do about 10.

 

2) Students will be given a piece of card stock with a 3.14 inch (approximately) segment drawn on it. Using one end of the segment as the center point, they will free-hand draw a circle with that radius. When all are done, I will use a compass to draw a circle, and the student whose circle is best will receive a prize. Yes, this is rather subjective, but no one argued about my choice for the winner in last year's class.

 

3) Students will drop toothpicks onto a lined paper, with the distance between the lines equal to the length of the toothpicks. The class results will be tallied to see how closely we come to approximating Pi per Buffon's Needle experiment: http://www.mathsisfun.com/activity/buffons-needle.html

 

4) Students will drop pennies and dimes onto a 1-inch square red and white checkerboard patterned "tablecloth". The class results will be tallied to see what percent of each coin lands completely within a square: we will compare our experimental results to the theoretical probabilities. Similar to this: http://www.mathsisfun.com/activity/coin-grid.html

 

5) Finally -- and this doesn't have to do with Pi, but it's fun and ties into our current chapter. Students will use toothpicks and mini-marshmallows to construct various polyhedral frameworks. They will tabulate the number of vertices (marshmallows), edges (toothpicks) and faces (polygons) and try to determine the formula that relates them.

 

Since our class meets right before lunch, we will also have food that's round.

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Our co-op doesn't meet on Thursday, so my Geometry class is celebrating a day early tomorrow. And, for good measure, my Physics class will be celebrating Einstein's birthday, too.

 

Just in case anyone's interested, here are the stations I will have set up for Geometry:

 

1) Students will recite Pi to as many decimal places as they have memorized. The winner will receive a prize. Last year, I had two students who got into the 60-70 range. Most will do about 10.

 

2) Students will be given a piece of card stock with a 3.14 inch (approximately) segment drawn on it. Using one end of the segment as the center point, they will free-hand draw a circle with that radius. When all are done, I will use a compass to draw a circle, and the student whose circle is best will receive a prize. Yes, this is rather subjective, but no one argued about my choice for the winner in last year's class.

 

3) Students will drop toothpicks onto a lined paper, with the distance between the lines equal to the length of the toothpicks. The class results will be tallied to see how closely we come to approximating Pi per Buffon's Needle experiment: http://www.mathsisfu...ons-needle.html

 

4) Students will drop pennies and dimes onto a 1-inch square red and white checkerboard patterned "tablecloth". The class results will be tallied to see what percent of each coin lands completely within a square: we will compare our experimental results to the theoretical probabilities. Similar to this: http://www.mathsisfu.../coin-grid.html

 

5) Finally -- and this doesn't have to do with Pi, but it's fun and ties into our current chapter. Students will use toothpicks and mini-marshmallows to construct various polyhedral frameworks. They will tabulate the number of vertices (marshmallows), edges (toothpicks) and faces (polygons) and try to determine the formula that relates them.

 

Since our class meets right before lunch, we will also have food that's round.

 

Hip, Hip Hurrah!!!! :hurray: :hurray: :hurray:

 

Faith

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I even wrote about it on my blog :)

 

Breakfast - mini egg "pizzas"

Lunch - I need to find something circular :)

Supper - Meatza

Dessert - GF pie :)

 

all schoolwork is "circular."

patterns and adding/subtracting circular things

write in a circle

the circular geography (bedroom, house, street, subdivision, town, state, country, world) book

 

You get point :)

 

We also all learned 15+ digits after the decimal of pi :)

 

Oh, and I was THRILLED to find Pi Day Carols. Honestly, one hard part of being a Witness is that Christmas Songs are CATCHY (especially as I wasn't always a Witness so actually know all the words). Now I have substitutions! I had so much fun singing them!

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