Pi Day… it’s coming!

It’s hard to believe that mid-March is approaching! That coveted math holiday that celebrates everyone’s favorite irrational number!

For years, I have given each and every one of my students my very own “Happy Pi Day” greeting card, outlining a brief history of Pi, as well as 2000 digits of pi to study and attempt to memorize 😉 Here’s the card: Happy Pi Day Greeting Card

Here are a few more of my favorite Pi Day resources:

http://teachpi.org/

I have especially enjoyed students’ pi songs and pi raps. Last year, I designed a “pi chain challenge” competition to help students visualize how an irrational number “behaves” but in somewhat of a teamwork-type race to create a paper chain representing the digits of pi (details of the activity can be found on my Teachers Pay Teachers page).

Another favorite is this quirky little website entitled “The Pi Searcher” I use a random-reporter strategy to choose a few lucky students, who share the digits of their birth date with the class. I enter the date as a string of consecutive numbers, and voila! If the student’s birth date appears somewhere in pi, the handy-dandy website tells just how far into pi the date appears. Students revel in being the one furthest into pi, or in that rare occasion when a birth date does NOT appear consecutively in pi!

http://www.angio.net/pi/piquery

Can’t wait to sport my t-shirt from a great little restaurant in Virginia Beach called PI-zerria. When I ate there last summer (twice!) the waitress set me up with a huge bag of temporary pi tatoos for my students. (Great pizza “pi” too!)

http://www.pi-zzeria.com/home.aspx