Celebrating National Pi Day (Slice 15 of 31)

This post is a part of the Slice of Life challenge which is hosted on the Two Writing Teachers blog.  The month of March the challenge is to write a blog post a day.

Last year I finally remembered on 3/14 to celebrate National Pi Day.  My math class did some exploration to discover this ratio so that they would remember what pi represents when working with circles.  Then I gave them a slice of pie.  It was so fun and I vowed to remember every year in the future so that I could highlight this ratio and make it memorable for my students.

This year I almost forgot.  Thank goodness for Facebook!  One of my friends shared this hilarious cartoon earlier this week and I was reminded and started planning the festivities.

My schedule on Thursdays is kind of crazy because my principal wanted all of our middle school level teachers to be able to meet at least once a week.  My students have a morning full of specials and so we end up with a lot shorter math class on this day.  I decided that this would not be the time to celebrate pi day so I came up with another plan.  

I wanted to incorporate this celebration into my afternoon schedule which had the added benefit of reaching more students.  In the afternoon, I have three Language Arts classes.  Looking at the March writing lesson of the month from Corbett Harrison, I discovered his writing notebook activity for Pi day.  So, yesterday my students and I ate pie and wrote pi poems.  Lately, I have tried a few poem formats with my students and have found it to be accessible and fun for all students.  (There were a few groans at first when poetry was mentioned, but they quickly realized that it was something they could do) 

This day of poem writing was another fun day and there is always room for pie!