I love Pi Day. It’s one of my FAVORITE holidays (and for sure, my favorite MATH holiday!). I love seeing all of these amazing ideas for celebrating Pi Day in your math classroom. However, I always feel like most of the activities cannot be completed by my students who won’t learn about area and circumference for another year. Over the years, I have started a collection of Pi Day activities that can be completed by students with no prior knowledge of circles!
This is one of my favorite activities to complete! Students in upper elementary and middle school often don’t know what pi is or understand why we celebrate Pi Day on 3/14. This quick and easy “scavenger hunt” lets students investigate Pi Day and try their hand at solving some simple circle questions.
These puzzles are so much fun for students to complete that they don’t realize that they are using algebraic thinking to solve systems of equations! Instead of letters for variables, students are figuring out the value of Pi Day related pictures. The puzzles vary in difficulty, but all of them include whole number values. They are great for grades 4-8!
This activity is so much fun and it lets student combine math and art! Students create a skyline by coloring in the units on graph paper to correspond to the digits of pi.
My students ALWAYS need extra practice throughout the year with graphing coordinates. This Pi Day mystery picture is lots of fun and gets students practicing this necessary (often boring) skill! I love that it includes all 4 quadrants and some decimal coordinate values!
A few years back I worked at a K-8 private school. My middle school kids paired up with the second grade class and helped their buddies make Pi Day bracelets like these ones. Each color represents a different digit from 0-9. Students string them on a bracelet in the correct order. It’s a great way for students to see which digits show up and in what order.
This free puzzle is a fun way for students to start learning the digits of Pi. It’s trickier than it looks because numbers repeat, but aren’t interchangeable in the puzzle!