Pi Day for Older Kids

I recently shared a few ideas for celebrating Pi Day with younger kids, but of course it’s also fun to do Pi Day with kids who are old enough to know what pi actually is.

You could have a pie making (or eating!) contest with older kids to celebrate, or have them write about their favorite kind of pie (pizza or otherwise).

Since numerical pi is kind of a code, you can make bracelets or beaded projects using the numbers of pi with beads in different colors to correspond to each number (so every 1 is green, every 2 is blue, for example) or make it simpler with one color for odd numbers and one for even numbers. Both are shown in this activity from Pink Stripey Socks.

You could also do the same color with different numbers of beads for each digit, for example you start with three beads of one color, then one of a different color, then four of another color and so on. Our Family Code has an example of this done in a necklace to 50 digits.

That post has more great pi related ideas you can do, including a color wheel activity, a graphing mosaic, perler bead suncatchers and more.

Rock Your Homeschool has a good collection of Pi Day printables for older kids, which includes a word search, coloring pages, a pie baking math activity, a page of pies to measure and a chart for measuring your own circular things, among other activities.

Finally, try your hand at some Pi-lish! This isn’t a real language but a way of writing or speaking where the words correspond to the digit in pi. So a sentence written in Pi-lish would start with a three-letter word, then a one-letter word, then four, then one, then five and so on. Royal Baloo has printables for practicing your Pi-lish and ultimately writing a poem in this style.

[Photo: Pink Stripey Socks.]

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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