Apple Pi

Once every few years, we have such an incredible homeschooling day that it makes up for all the rest (at least that's what I'm telling myself). We were certainly due for one, and today was it.

It all began several hours ago with an inspiration for a math lesson. I gathered the troops and told them to go on a circle hunt, with each kid bringing three things shaped like a circle to the kitchen table. Then I introduced the terms "diameter" and "circumference" and we talked about how to measure them. The kids made a chart of each object's diameter and circumference and then used a calculator to divide the circumference by the diameter. I pointed out that the answer was about 3, no matter what size the circle was.

I was about to launch into an explanation about pi when Noah interrupted and said, "Hey, I wonder what the diameter of my head is!" I asked him how we might figure out the diameter without jamming a ruler through his brain. He thought for awhile and then said, "Couldn't we just measure the circumference and divide it by 3?" So we did that, and then I told them that there was a name for that special 3.14 number.

As soon as I said it was called pi, my food-obsessed daughter said, "Can we make an apple pie?" That led to an English lesson about spelling and homonyms. Sarah couldn't be distracted from the pie, so we made an apple pie, which led to a big kitchen cleaning. All in all a great homeschool day.

The pictures (which I don't know how to keep in order--if you know, please tell me!) show the kids eating a long apple peel from each end till they met in the middle and using the long peels as a jump rope.