It’s that time of year to celebrate everyone’s favourite irrational number: pi!
Check out this video about Pi Day (it’s focused on the US, but gives some background):
Even though the actual “Pi Day” is Saturday March 14, Division 7 decided to celebrate early. Students have been rotating through various pi-related stations over the past couple of days. Pi doesn’t show up in our math curriculum until grade 7, so for us, we’re exploring this math concept just for fun!
Our Pi Day activities included team work, games, and art. Today we celebrated Pi Day early by having a “Pi Off” to see who can memorize the longest decimal of pi (the official world record is 70 030 digits, set by Suresh Kumar Sharma! It took him 17 hours to say all those digits.) I was AMAZED how well our students did! Our winner was able to recite 156 decimal places! ONE HUNDRED FIFTY SIX!
We loved this song to help us practice (I’m sorry to the families affected by the repeated singing of pi):
Did you catch that? Check out one million digits of pi here.
This term, Division 5 learned about the history of the Métis sash, or ceinture fléchée. We tried our hand (or rather our fingers) at a textile technique called “finger weaving,” used by Indigenous peoples all over North America. Here is a video about some of the history of the Métis sash.
Students worked in pairs to help each other learn the process. One student held the yarn while the other did the weaving. Weaving was like learning some new dance steps, but once we understood the pattern we were flying!
Students practiced their paragraph writing to accompany their weaving, to be displayed at the Student-Led Conferences. Their writing should give some information about who the Métis people are, and students’ experience with the process of learning and doing finger weaving.