It’s pretty awesome that there’s a day to celebrate math. Even better- it has a link to a tasty pastry like pie. Also, it’s pretty amazing that I teach 7th and 8th grade math and both grade levels work with pi. Pi Day happens to always fall during spring break for us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the day or week before spring break.
At this point in the year each day we naturally review things from earlier in the year, so I take this Pi Day celebration as a way to review irrational numbers, volume of cylinders, cones, and spheres, and area and circumference of a circle. Of course, we also eat pie.
In this article you’ll find nine engaging math activities perfect for celebrating Pi Day. To complete all 9 of these math activities takes around 2 hours. You may not have time for all of the activities on this list, but over the course of several days it’s a fun way to incorporate Pi Day fun into the math classroom. You can also give some of the activities as bell work through the week leading up to Pi Day. Let’s dig into these low-prep Pi Day activities.
Pi Day – Choice board organization for accountability
To help students keep on track, I organize these activities on a choice board that looks like a tablet. Then, students get each square stamped or colored in when they finish each activity. You can download my Pi Day choice board template below.
Of the 9 activities, 8 of them are for students to do independently or with a partner. The game in the middle is a whole class game to review area and circumference of a circle. Also, there’s a blank template of a choice board included if you want to write in your own activities.
(Click here or on the picture below to download the Pi Day Week Activity Choice Board for FREE.)
One of the activities uses the choice board to ask and answer questions.
Here’s 11 activities for the week of Pi Day:
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- Finish 4 Circle Mazes (including this FREE one!)
- List 5 facts about Pi
- Search the Digits of Pi
- Rational or Irrational Texting Activity
- Area and Circumference of a Circle Knockout Game
- Memorization Showdown
- Three Act Math-Which Cylinder Has More Volume
- Write a Pi-Ku
- Make an infographic
- New option: Pi Day Digital Escape Room
- New option: Pi Day Guesses and Wagers Trivia Game
Finish 4 Circle Mazes
I love mazes and so do my students. We complete a maze just about every day through out the year in my class.
I have a set of three mazes for area and circumference of a circle that I use for Pi Week. These are actually three mazes that my students completed back in November, but we use them as a review this time of year. Students can’t remember the answers from the first time around because it’s been such a long time since the first time we did them.
The other maze I use is a maze that I only use this time of year. (You can see it in the pic above). It’s a little more challenging. In this maze students figure out how much pie is left in a pie tin. They assume that the pies are 1 inch deep so there’s no need to know the formula for volume of a cylinder. (I do explain volume of cylinder to my 7th graders so, that they understand why the answers are cubed.)
You can get this maze for free by signing up for the Free Maze of the Month Club. You’ll get this circumference maze now and a free maze every month from now on.
Grab your FREE Pi Day Circumference Maze here!
Students complete the mazes at the beginning of each hour as bell work. As long as they are present each day, this is an easy square for them to cross off.
List 5 facts about Pi Day
Junior high students aren’t always good at listing facts. I’m just going to start right there. This activity seems simple enough- ask students to list 5 facts about Pi Day. Even though this seems so straightforward, I find I still need to give a little help to make it even more simple by giving students some hints, clues, and websites where they need to find the facts.
You can try it without giving them this support. That’s your prerogative, of course, but don’t say I didn’t warn you! You may get some pretty out there “facts,” and some kids will just look at the internet for a long time and never write anything down.
After the majority of kids have their facts written, you can have them share with each other. It’s fun to do this “speed dating” style. Have students stand in two lines facing each other. They get about 30 seconds to share a couple of facts and then they rotate down a person and share with that person. This activity is a great way to get students to interact with each other and not just with their friends.
Search the digits of pi
The whole purpose of celebrating Pi Day is for students to understand more about the concept of pi. This activity will give students an experience with pi that shows just how hard to comprehend pi is. They go to this website and type in any string of digits and it will tell you how many times that string is repeated in pi and where it’s repeated. You can have students try significant numbers like their birthday, phone number, or zip code.
The longer the string, the less likely that sequence will appear. This gives students a deeper look into pi and a chance to talk about what pi really means.
Rational or Irrational Texting Activity
All their lives students work with rational numbers, and then boom!, in junior high they meet irrational numbers. The problem is that they’ve never heard the term rational number so they don’t even know that they’ve worked so much with rational numbers. Then in middle school they meet pi, their first irrational number. Before you know it, when you start to ask students which numbers are rational or irrational, they want to call all numbers irrational.
Students often think that fractions are irrational, negative numbers are irrational, decimals are irrational. It’s like they have built a schema in their brains that anything that is not a regular whole number is irrational. I teach them and work with them on the fact that the only irrational numbers they will work with at this level of math are pi and imperfect square roots and cube roots. 
This texting activity for rational and irrational numbers is designed to help students build a better schema about irrational numbers, and of course that includes pi. It’s a fun and engaging activity where students create a texting conversation related to rational and irrational numbers. This gives creative students a chance to shine which doesn’t always happen in math class.
Area and Circumference of a Circle Knockout Game
If you’ve never tried a knockout game, this is a great opportunity to try. This game will get the whole class involved and participating. The game is projected on the screen through your computer.
There’s a game board and students choose a pie. Once you click on a pie, a question appears. Everyone answers the question. The answer is revealed and if a student gets it right then they get the points and if they get it wrong they don’t get the points. Everyone answers every question and they keep track of their own points.
Game board:
Questions:
There are a few “bonuses” throughout the game, and students love them. They can be good bonuses or bad bonuses. I use this game to review, and it is a great way to model questions with students. I spend a fair amount of time showing them how to do certain things and working on fixing common misconceptions. (read more about knockout games here.)
Pi Memorization Showdown
I supply students with the first 20 digits of pi and they have a chance through the week to practice memorizing them. Then, at the end of the week, we have a showdown to see how can remember the most digits. This is a fun challenge that doesn’t take a lot of time, but adds some competition to the class.
You can find the first 100,000 digits of pi by clicking here.
If you like popcorn, which one would you buy? Challenge activity
You’ve probably seen this problem where students have to try and figure out which cylinder holds more popcorn. It’s done with a regular piece of paper. This website walks you through solving these questions. You could complete this as a whole class or students could do it when they finish everything else, as a challenge.
The website does a good job of explaining the answer and giving additional problems and ideas. You could do it with or without popcorn. Popcorn is an easy treat and kids get really excited when there’s food in math class.
Write a Pi-ku
I used to be a 7th grade language arts teacher and I remember writing and learning about Haikus. Well, this Pi-ku activity gives me the opportunity to do a little bit of poetry in math class. I’ve seen different versions of the Pi-ku activity on Pinterest, and I made my own version for my students.
Have students write a 5 line poem with a theme of pi day. Here are the parameters for the Pi-ku:
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- It must have a Pi Day theme.
- The first line has 3 words, the second has 1 word, the third has 4 words, the fourth line has 1 word and the fifth line has 5 words.
- The first line and the last line should rhyme at the end.
Students should not complete this activity until they’ve done some of the other activities so that they have a background in Pi Day themes. That makes it much simpler for students to complete.
Here’s an example poem:
So many digits
Irrational
Never stops, Never repeats
Confounding
Memorize it and feel legit
The creativity that some kids shows will blow you away. So much of what we do in math is prescribed for students and this gives them a chance to be creative. It will always help them to remember because they have something memorable to attach to in their brain.
Make an infographic that explains and shows pi
This can be a big undertaking and I only have students work on this if they’re finished with all of the other options. It can take a long time and they might not be able to finish, but I think it’s a good opportunity for them to try and see what an infographic can do.
Pikto-Chart is a website where students can make their own infographic. They can use the information that they have been gathering throughout the other activities to put on the infographic. They can log-in with a Gmail account. Near the end of the year I sometimes have another infographic activity and this is a good warm-up for them to see what an infographic is.
Pi Day Digital Escape Room
Another option for a fun Pi Day digital activity that students complete individually is the Pi Day Digital Escape Room. This game challenges students to solve problems and use vocabulary related to pi.
Digital escape rooms present students with 3 different challenges. When they solve each task, they uncover a code. Checking this code let’s them know if they’re on the right track, or if they have some mistakes.
Students love seeing quesitons presented in a new way, and the fun of solving a mystery really keeps them hooked. Plus, assigning this digital assignment is a cinch in Google Classroom or other LMS.
Pi Day Guesses and Wagers Trivia Game
If you’re looking for another option for a whole class game in the middle of the choice board, this Pi Day Guesses and Wagers Trivia Game is a fun option. This game gets students applying their math reasoning while they make estimates and examine reasonableness of answers.
One advantage of playing this game is that while it promotes healthy math discussions and overall math thinking, it doesn’t rely on specific math concepts. It can be played with students in 6th-12th grade.
This trivia game is played by sharing the questions with the whole class. When playing in class, students work in small groups to make estimates and create their best guess. Then, all guesses are displayed and the groups place their “wager” chips on the guesses they feel are most reasonable.
There’s also an alternative version of this trivia game with multiple choice answers. This gives another option to use with students in a distance learning setting.
Try one thing… and eat some pie
I realize that I’ve shared a lot of ideas, and that can seem overwhelming to see of them at once. You don’t have to do so much for Pi Day. I’d challenge you to pick one of the activities and try it for Pi Day. Most of the activities are no prep and they will get students thinking about pi. Be sure to eat some pie with your students and celebrate Albert Einstein’s birthday, as well. Happy Pi Day!
Here’s a link to a discounted bundle of the three paid resources for the Pi Day Choice Board, including the choice board:
