Thursday, March 25, 2010

Pie Day!

Pies by TSelrahc
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tevirselrahc/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
I am currently placed in a 5th grade classroom on Mondays for one of my classes here at MSU. I went into my placement for the entire day to help out with a group activity both 5th grade classes where doing together.  We met in the gym and the teachers paired off the students in premeditated pairs, and explained what they would be doing.  In math class, the teachers discussed pie and how the number of pie is found in circles.  The students received a worksheet which had various objects listed on it.  They were given a yard stick, a piece of string, and the objects in which they had to find pie for.  They would use the string to find the circumference and the diameter. Then they would divide the two numbers so they were able to receive the number for pie. They did this very well and worked great with one another! I thought this was a very neat activity for the students to partake in. They learned how exactly to calculate pie, and were able to eat a giant cookie afterwards! It was a lot of fun!  I will definitely keep this activity in mind when I am a teacher and have my own classroom.  

1 comment:

  1. That sounds like a neat activity, but I have definitely been in a lot of classes where the teacher comes up with Pi Day activities that are simply a waste of time, such as taking a long time to write out as many of the numerals in the number pi as they can. Knowing the 659th numeral in the number pi does not really help me understand the number pi anymore if you know what I mean. It's good that your teacher was able to come up with beneficial activities.

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