Pi Day Activities for Little Kids

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14 (because the date is 3.14, the beginning of the number for pi), and it’s a great time for kids of all ages to craft with circles, play with numbers, and maybe even eat some actual pie.

If your kids are younger but you still want to have some fun with this holiday, read on. (Activities for older kids to come!)

To introduce the idea of pi to younger kids, explain that it’s a number that expresses the relationship between a circle’s diameter (the measurement across the center from edge to edge) and its circumference (the measurement of the outside edge, all the way around).

Pi is an infinite number and the same digit never repeats (meaning there are, for example, never two 3s in a row).

Since pi is about circles you can make circle prints, cut our circles, use circles in art projects, eat round snacks. Go on a circle hunt! Play ring around the Rosie, or follow the leader in a circle. So many easy ideas.

Pieces by Polly talks about making fraction plates, repeating patterns with pies, making art with circles and making tiny snack pies.

Tinker Lab has a cute pi day printable art challenge. Can you use three colors to decorate the grids with different patterns in 14 minutes?

Royal Baloo has a fun printable pi board game where you collect cards with the goal of getting as many digits of pi as you can.

Teach Beside Me has a printable pi puzzle that goes together to show 25 digits of pi. It’s not as easy as it sounds because the digits repeat.

And this free pi poster from Cindy Lam at Teachers Pay Teachers can be filled out with one child or a whole classroom and includes fun things like listing your favorite thing that’s a circle or words that have the letters pi in them.

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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