To celebrate Pi Day, fifth graders in Cottage Lane Elementary School teacher Denise Caunitz’s class engaged in a variety of math activities inspired by pi, which is an irrational number with the first three digits being 3.14. Students learned that it is a mathematical constant that expresses the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Students were given their choice of several activities including measuring the diameter and circumference of circular objects within the room, measuring the circumference of a picture of different pies when given the diameter, making a paper chain with each number of pi and even a word search with key vocabulary words including irrational and decimal.
Students worked in groups as they created colorful paper chains and searched high and low throughout the classroom to find round objects to measure. One group even made their own pi-inspired french fry box with all of the numbers that make up pi represented on the fries sticking out of the box!