Pi Day is on March 14th and there are plenty of Pi Day activities you can do to celebrate! Math can be so fun. I get a taste of it most days with a mathematician for a husband (don’t tell him, but I actually do like math). There are plenty of ways I encounter math every day. I love baking. I enjoy art. I use money. I have kids who do math homework. I have some fun Pi Day activities to have some fun at your house. Plus, there’s a recipe at the end!
Pie
Starting with the obvious Pi Day activity: a Pie Party! Pizza pie, apple pie, ice cream pie, you name it! Before enjoying each of these pies, you can take the time to measure the circumference and do the math. You can then add a little fun with fractions by cutting the pies into slices and talking about ratios. If you want to add a little extra, you can find a pi shaped pizza cutter, a pi-shaped pie plate, or fun plates with crazy fractions that actually say, “I ate some pie.”
See a fun pie recipe below!
Plates
If you don’t want to use the actual pies for measuring, you can have fun decorating paper plates for this Pi Day activity. All you need are some basic paper plates and fun colored papers. Cutting the plates into various sizes to play with fractions could really be fun. Hooray for math!
Paper Chain
The university I graduated from would celebrate Pi Day each year by giving a free piece of pie to anyone who came and added a paper “link” to the Pi chain that stretched all through the building. You could start this same tradition! Assign a paper color to each number and link digit after digit, and add one link for each digit. It can make a fun decoration!
Jokes
Inundate your kids with math jokes and puns! There are SO many to find online. I bet you they laugh from at least one (just don’t count how many your kids groan at). Just search “funny math jokes for kids.” Note, the “for kids” is important. There are more than a few inappropriate math puns out there.
Jewelry
A necklace or bracelet is a cute Pi Day activity to show off the digits of Pi (3.14159 are the digits of an infinitely long number, and would probably be the best starting place for a bracelet). Have your child string 3 beads of one color, followed by 1 of another, then 4, 1, and so on. You can also just assign a color to each number and do one bead per digit. Pipe cleaners are a good “string” for young kids and bracelets, and yarn or other string is better for necklaces.
Skyline
This Pi Day activity can be turned into a pretty neat art project. Each building in the skyline represents a number in the Pi sequence. Three blocks, one block, four blocks, etc. It’s a project that can go different ways. You can use lots of colors for the buildings to make it super bright and fun, or you can use black for the buildings and do a sunset/sunrise behind them for beauty! You can challenge your kids to make a crazy long skyline – remember, Pi is infinitely long!
Books
I found a fun series of books when I did a search for Pi Day activities. The Sir Cumference series is full of math puns and cheesy adventures. I love it! The best one for Pi Day is Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi. Sure, the names of the characters are all math puns and the premise is a little cheesy, but I enjoyed reading it with my kids. We are looking forward to reading more of these books. You can find some of the series at our local libraries (but not the Pi one, unfortunately).
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Looking for more fun for March? Check out our Guide to March Events!
