Did Someone Say Pi?

The most EPIC Pi Day of the century was today, 3.14.15, and at 9:26:53, seven dedicated third graders from Horizon Science Academy-Dayton Elementary attended Saturday School in room 177 to help give them a fun boost to their education as we move into the Spring.

Saturday School is designed to be even more hands on and experiential than what occurs in the classroom through the week.  Often, we have a theme to our learning and today was one such day.  Today's them was Pi and Pie!

We began our lesson with an introduction to the book Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi, A Math Adventure by Cindy Neuschwander.

Students were given dry erase boards and markers on which they were asked to record math terms that they heard as the story was read aloud.

Da'Marieon creates his list of math terms.

Once we reached page 17, the story was paused and students were shown a demonstration of the concepts the characters in the story discovered. . . The realization that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than 3 times the diameter of the circle.  It is actually 3 1/7 diameters, or 3.141592653. . .  We took yarn and measured across the diameter, cutting that length.  Then, we cut yarn the length of the circumference.  We observed that, indeed, the circumference of the circle is just over 3 times the diameter.

After we listened to the remainder of the story, we related what we learned to our recent study of fractions.  To do this, Students were distributed a set of construction paper circles representing pies.  We discussed what kinds of pies each color of paper could represent.   Students generated the following ideas:

BROWN:  chocolate cream, pecan, pumpkin, turkey pot pie, chicken pot pie

YELLOW:  lemon, banana, coconut cream, sugar cream, apple

ORANGE:  peach, pumpkin

BLUE:  blueberry, blackberry

RED:  strawberry, cherry, strawberry rhubarb, red raspberry

Students were instructed to choose one "pie" that is their favorite.  Once that was done, These "pies" were folded in half.  We noted that when folding in half, we were folding on the diameter  of the "pie".  Next, students cut the pie on the fold, so that they now had two halves.  We reviewed that each part of their pie was 1/2 and we called that a unit fraction.  A unit fraction is a fraction whose numerator is 1.  

Next, students traded 1/2, or one unit, of their pie to a friend.  We identified parts of our pie by stating, "One-half of my pie is orange," and so on.

After this, we repeated the above procedure, cutting each half in half so that now we had four pieces.  Again, we identified that we still had a unit fraction but now, our unit fraction was 1/4.

Diamond cuts her pie pieces into one-fourths.

Students traded a 1/4 piece of their pie to a friend and then returned to their desks.  After putting their pies back together as a whole, they stated fractions about their pie.  For example, "Three-fourths of my pie is red and 1/4 of my pie is yellow."  We noted that 3/4 is NOT a unit fraction.

Finally, we repeated the cut and trade procedure a third time so that we now had a pie cut into 1/8 pieces.  After we discussed our pies and compared our pies to each others, we glued our pies onto paper and recorded fractions identifying the portion of our pies that each color made.

Khadijah has her pie glued on paper and is writing fractions about her pie.

Before moving on to our next lesson segment, we took a moment to sing a special Pi Day song:

Following this activity, we read an informational text book, Pi Day by Nora Miller (Reading A-Z). Students practiced their oral reading fluency while learning that congress voted to make March 14 National Pi Day in the hopes that students would discover that they really do like math and science. We learned that people celebrate Pi Day by eating pie (of course!), both traditional pie and pizza pie, drinking Pi-neapple juice, doing math and science activities, singing songs, and having Pi Day 5Ks.

We were VERY excited this year at Horizon Science Academy-Dayton Elementary to be able to celebrate Pi Day in nearly ALL of those special ways.  Immediately following Saturday School, students, staff and families of both students and staff gathered to run or walk our very own Pi Day 5K.

We had a wonderful turnout for this event and the rain dried up just in time as the sun came out to shine down upon us for this special event. Along with many others, 6 third graders laced up their running shoes and we took to Sinclair Park clad in our lime green Pi Day 5K shirts.

Khadijah, Alivia, Abubakr, Angel, Da'Marieon, and Cayla gathered together pre-race.

Along the way, we had MANY laughs and made lots of memories.  The third graders are quite a group of characters and the 5K racers were in peak form today!

Abubakr brought up the rear most of the race only to gain
a "sudden flash of energy" 10 feet from the finish line as he
flew by Ms. A (who had planned to wait on him so we'd cross
it together)...I think he must have heard the theme song from
Chariot's of Fire at the end...nah...he just wanted to dog his
teacher...LOL!

Cayla represented third grade and the girls by finishing
FIRST girl and FOURTH overall.

And here comes Da'Marieon...apparently he got hot running since he took off his
race shirt...as he past me, he said, "Here Ms. A.  Hold this.  I gotta finish this race!"
Glad I can help, D.  =)

Angel runs back to meet Abubakr, Khadijah (who joined me on my final lap)
 and me as we approached the finish line.

Once we arrived back at school.  Every  received participation certificates and trophies were given to the first, second, and third place finishers.  Then we enjoyed pizza pie and pie.  It really was a great day and certainly one of my most memorable and enjoyable with my students.