Elementary Students Celebrate Pi Day

Pi Day is always a favorite holiday in Elementary, and not just because we love pie! This week, students enjoyed a daylong celebration of math in honor of March 14th.

We started the day by learning about the number pi and its relationship to the circumference of a circle, by reading the entertaining read aloud Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi. After that, students broke into small groups and rotated through a variety of pi and math related activities.

At one stop, students created pi artwork by using colors to represent the digits of pi and then following its sequence of numbers either with dots or lines. After that, they played fun math games including favorites like Blokus, Set and Equate. Next, they decorated a number and posed with it to contribute to a collaborative photo slideshow that showed the sequence of the first 51 digits of pi (see below). They also enjoyed creating pi bracelets using different colors of beads to represent the digits of pi.

Of course, no celebration of Pi Day is complete without pie! Small groups also worked together to make two types of pie – Lemon and Oreo, which we all enjoyed after lunch.

Our morning ended with one of Maria Montessori’s Five Great Lessons, the History of Numbers. Students learned how our number system developed and changed from prehistory to modern time. They learned about the role that geographical proximity and trade routes played in the sharing of numbers systems.

Everyone had a wonderful day celebrating numbers together!