Happy Pi Day to you! Happy Pi Day to you! Happy Pi Day everybody! Happy Pi Day to you! And many more...

Have you found yourself singing this in anticipation of March 14, 2012, otherwise known as Pi Day? Do you find yourself at random moments during the day humming the tune to 3.14159?

Well, maybe we aren’t quite that excited, but everyone knows that Pi Day is a pretty important day in schools. Therefore, let’s take the opportunity to involve students in a motivational activity which reinforces the literacy and math connection.

There is so much fascinating information on pi! Did you know that Albert Einstein shared a birthday with Pi Day, or that a person once had 35 decimal digits of pi carved on his gravestone? It is also interesting to know that Indiana tried to legislate a new value for pi. Students love trivia, and interesting facts such as these can help to motivate them to learn more about pi.

The following activity is designed to get students interested in the mathematical concept pi. If your students have different teachers for content area subjects, it can serve as a great way for teachers in content areas to collaborate on a lesson. This activity not only links math and literacy, but it gets students looking at a wide variety of texts.

Getting Started

Locate a wide variety of sources related to pi. This might include the text to songs, newspaper articles, informational trade books, videos, poems, and others. You may even choose to ask the students to go on a scavenger hunt to find texts which relate to pi. To make it more interesting, you can divide the class into small groups, and have a competition to see which group of students can find the most diverse text examples which mention pi. Students can bring the samples into class on the assigned day and give an overview of the texts they found with the entire class. This is a great time to talk to your students about diverse texts and the key features they find in the informational texts.

Once the texts are located, explain to the students that they are going to work in groups to create a “found poem.” Found poems have lines containing information found in other sources. This doesn’t mean that students don’t add their own lines to the poem, but some of the information comes from other sources. The best way to explain found poetry is to share an example of a found poem with the students on another topic. I created the following example; it was shared with students who were about to create found poetry related to electricity (Altieri, 2011). The underlined lines were taken from Seymour Simon’s STORMS (1992).



Read the sample with the students, and talk about how the author wrote a poem on thunderstorms but interspersed information on storms found in a published source. If students have experience with poetry, you might ask them to incorporate poetic elements into their poems such as repetition. However, I would discourage the use of rhyme. When students are asked to write a poem which rhymes, it limits word choice so it doesn’t usually include the best content. If students have not been exposed to a variety of poetry, and they have minimal experience with writing their own poetry, they will often try to make the lines of a poem rhyme unless told otherwise.

Give the small groups of students plenty of time to review their texts. Then tell the class to select and use key lines or phrases from some of the different texts within their pi poems. While students might not be able to use all of the sources they brought to class, this activity gets them looking at a lot of texts. Consider asking the students to use phrases from three to five of the texts they reviewed. The following poem I created incorporates diverse sources, including phrases from two informational trade books, GO FIGURE A TOTALLY COOL BOOK ABOUT NUMBERS (2005) and WHY PI? (2009), both by Johnny Ball. (The other sources are listed at the end of this Teaching Tip.)



Each group can write the final draft of their pi poem on large sheets of paper and use a different colored marker for each source they used in their poem. Then the groups can take turns sharing the poems with the rest of the class.

As the poems are read, the rest of the class may have questions about some of the lines. Perhaps students didn’t find the information about Indiana in their reading, or didn’t realize some of the uses for the pi formula. This conversation can serve as an opportunity to broaden the background knowledge for all children by sharing and discussing information found on the topic.

Let’s use Pi Day to reinforce the connections students can make with literacy and math. Creating found poems can get our students excited about texts, as well as get children motivated to learn more about pi.

Of course if you find your students humming “Happy Pi Day to you!” by the end of the day … don’t blame me.

References

Altieri, J. (2011). Content Counts! Developing Disciplinary Literacy Skills K-6. Newark, NJ: International Reading Association.

Ball, J. (2005). Go figure! A totally cool book about numbers. New York: DK Children.

Ball, J. (2009). Why Pi? How math applies to everyday life. New York: DK Children.

Ferland, K., & Calhoun, B. (2001). The Pi Song. Retrieved from http://facstaff.bloomu.edu/kferland/Pi_Songs/songs.html

Roddenberry, G. and Bloch, R. (Writers), & Pevney, J. (Director). (1967). Wolf in the fold. [Television series episode]. In G. L. Coon (Producer), Star trek. Culver City, CA: Desilu Productions.

Whiting, E.E. (2010, March 10). Einstein and pi: Princeton celebrates their day. U.S. 1: Princeton’s Business and Entertainment Newspaper. Retrieved from http://www.us1newspaper.com/index.php?option=com_us1more&Itemid=6&key=3-10-10%20pi%20day

Simon, S. (1992). Storms. New York: HarperCollins.

Jennifer L. Altieri, Ph.D. is the Literacy Division Coordinator at The Citadel in Charleston, SC. She has worked as a reading consultant with elementary and middle schools in St. Louis, Missouri, and an elementary school in Beaufort, South Carolina. Her interests include sharing multiethnic literature, creating poetry with young children, and developing disciplinary literacy skills.

Jennifer recently released her newest book, CONTENT COUNTS! DEVELOPING DISCIPLINARY LITERACY SKILLS K-6.