I tried two different things this year to celebrate Pi Day in my classroom. My high school students have already done the string to measure the circumference and diameter in previous years. I wanted to do something more active than watching youtube videos. So I watched for ideas on twitter. (If you are not a twitter user, please consider getting an account and trying it!) The first activity I found was Pi Poems. This came from the great blog by Eric Curts. He has so many great technology ideas for various subject areas. (Here is the Pi Poem blog post). The structure of a Pi Poem is that the number of letters in the word match the corresponding digit in Pi. The first word is 3-letters long, the second is 1-letter long, the third is 4 letters long and so on. I teamed up with the ELA department for this assignment. We gave them some guidelines like: the poem had to be Pi-themed. Basically, it had to be about pi or something circular. They also had to create a final product that was creative. (We are going to display their poems at our spring Art Show!) Here is the google doc we used to give them their guidelines. We also supplied the students with Eric Curts' spreadsheet to help keep track letters in the words. I loved the resulting poems. They were unique and clever. See below for some of my favorites! The second activity I did was a twitter project I found on Alice Keelers blog. The original activity was designed by Ashley Fort for historical figures as the subject. I tweaked it to be about pi. My students were told to research pi, its history, and its uses. On Pi Day, I gave them the template and final instructions to make a mock twitter page for pi. They had to come up with a handle, the bio, a picture, and then tweet as pi and also as someone tweeting to pi. I enjoyed what they came up with, however, we had a little problem with just copy and pasting what they found on websites. When they shared their work with the rest of the class, we had a good discussion about plagiarism and how to appropriately share someone else's words. Here is the result of that day. Some of the Pi Poems from March 14th, 2018
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AuthorI teach mathematics for grades 7-12. Teaching mathematics is my passion. Archives
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