Ms. Ramos' PI DAY Activities
These are the activities that I do with my seventh grade students on, or near, March 14. We complete almost all of these activities during class. The students that don't then finish the activities at home for homework. All of the links below are to PDF documents. You'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view them. Depending on how your web browser is configured they'll either open in your browser or be downloaded to your computer.
I made a transparency of "Pi Day Activities" and we go over the various activites at the beginning of class. I also made a "poster" of the first 10,000 Digits of Pi and I hang that in my classroom after discussing it with my students. We also talk about mnemonics and I share some examples with my students. (My personal favorite is in Spanish - "Sol y Luna y Mundo Proclaman al Eterno Autor del Cosmos" - my Spanish-speaking students think it's very cool.)
The day before "Pi Day" I borrow balls of different sizes from our P.E. Department. These are used by my students for the "find the volume of a sphere" activity.
Each student gets one of the following pages. I let them work with partners. (I have found that I need to provide my lower-level math classes with access to math dictionaries, because the sixth grade textbook we use does not have the formula for the volume of a sphere.) After students complete the activities, they turn them in with the Scoring Sheet stapled on top, followed by the Tool Kit, the Area problem, and the Volume problem.