Pi Day and Pie Day
This was by far my favorite Pi day ever as a teacher. Table Talk Pies came in for the win big time by donating five boxes full of individual pies! Peach ended up being the most popular one among the students.
In each of my Algebra II classes, we did 3 rounds of vocabulary BINGO and the winner of each round got to choose a pie.
I didn’t hand out pies or do Bingo in my AP Calculus classes, but almost all of those seniors are on the Math team, which I run, so they got their pie after school.
After first period, I traveled with 11 of my math team students one final time to the local elementary school that we have a partnership with. About twice a month since September, I have driven them to the elementary school so that my math team students could work with their math team students to prepare them for their math Olympiad monthly tournaments.
Since this last visit was on Pi day, I saved one whole box to bring for our visit to share with the 27 fifth and sixth graders. They don’t have a full understanding yet of what Pi is, but they still had fun eating the pie!
Right after school, I got eight pizzas (going along with the circular theme) for our end-of-season math team party in my room. Most of my math team was able to come, and we ate pizza and pie, had a senior farewell, and handed out awards to our top performers this year.
One of my amazing juniors helped me create a slideshow for our senior farewell and cut and pasted photos of each senior from all the meets and pasted them to each senior’s slide. We had 18 seniors this year, so this was not a quick task! Here’s the title page of the slideshow:
Here is a sample page for one of our seniors. I projected the slides one by one and each senior had a chance to talk to the underclassmen and answer the questions on the slide:
Also, another one of my amazing juniors took the time to crochet beautiful red roses for each senior, which I handed to each senior when it was their turn to talk.
For the awards, I had a trophy for first and second place and a medal for third place. I got these on Amazon: FIRST place, SECOND place, MEDALS links.
Overall, it went really well! The only thing I want to add for next year potentially is a circle-drawing competition for fun where students face off against each other and the class votes on the better circle. The winning students from each face-off continue on in a bracket style to get the champion circle-drawer. It’s important to make a minimum size for the circle, so some students don’t draw a tiny circle that they can make perfect.
Maybe I’ll incorporate more mathy Pi-related problems as well. I don’t do a recitation competition for the digits of Pi because almost all of my students have already done this in middle school.