Sunday, March 15, 2009

Happy "Pi Day"!!

Let's start by saying, yes, I am a nerd, and proud of it. No need to tease, I embrace my nerd-ness.

Saturday was officially "Pi Day 2009." A day to celebrate the number Pi. Pi, Greek letter, is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535... Pi Day is celebrated by math enthusiasts around the world on March 14th. You know, like the start of the number: 3.14.... March 14..... 3/14.... get it?? If you're really into it, you can stop and celebrate at 1:59 p.m. on March 14- 3.14159 is the start of Pi. It is a pretty interesting number- With the use of computers, Pi has been calculated to over 3 trillion digits past the decimal. Pi is an irrational number meaning it will continue infinitely without repeating. Another interesting coincidence, Albert Einstein was born on Pi Day in 1879.
Since Pi Day was on a Saturday this year, we celebrated at school on Friday. After lunch we had a rotation of activities teaching the kids about how to find Pi and some interesting facts about the number. The student all brought pies to bake in our solar ovens and we couldn't resist making a Pi symbol from some of the pies.I had the kids make a paper-chain of Pi as far as we could. I used a different color of paper for each digit (0-9) so the kids could see that there really is no repetition in Pi, it is totally random. We got to 880 digits and the paper chain looks really cute hanging on the wall all around my classroom now! The photo below shows the last half of the chain. It is very long!We also wore cute Pi t-shirts I made with iron-on transfers with these comics on the back. It was a blast, I hope my students learned something, and if not, it is a day they will remember and the pie sure was yummy!

I'll leave you with some Pi humor:

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