Pi Day

Not quite in time for Pi Day (Yesterday, we were busy eating pie with friends.) is a video of Physics Girl estimating pi with darts.  When I watched the first bit, I almost gave up on it.  It's only human to aim for the centre of a target.  But it's worth a watch to the end! 

The kids loved it, especially the part where they throw multiple darts with a blindfold on!

Infinity

An acquaintance recommended a site full of "math in daily life" videos.  Lately, math around here has become a little dull.  SpiderGirl is practising multiplication tables; BatBoy hasn't had anything new for awhile; so the inspiration was welcome.

"The Infinite Life of Pi" caught BatBoy's imagination.

He calls these his "infinite drawings."  He made one that looked just like a visual representation of Fibonacci's sequence too.  (It was a series of adjacent squares.)  From there, we went on to explore ways infinity shows up.  His drawings reminded me of fractals, so I found some videos to show him.

And of course, the Ted-Ed had a video on fractals too.

Finally, we looked at what happens when we allow long division to go into decimals instead writing a remainder or changing to a mixed fraction.

Take Me to the Moon

Daily math doesn't have to mean practical situations that everybody gets into all the time.  Sometimes, daily math just means math that happens to come up. 

 

Today, A. made a comment that she could jump six times as high on the moon.  When I challenged her idea that she was jumping as high from the floor as the top of her head at the peak of her jump, we decided to measure.

 

The very high tech measurement device:  a piece of sidewalk chalk in a chalk holder, taped onto a headband.

 

First, A. marked the chalk's height against the wall while she was standing.

 

 

Then she jumped while applying enough pressure for the chalk to draw on the wall.  She did this several times to achieve the highest jump she could.

 

 

She measured the distance between her initial marking and the highest point on the chalk line:  20 cm.

 

 

Multiplying 20 cm by 6 gives 120 cm, or 1 m 20.  How long is that?  She rolled out the measuring tape, and we also held it up vertically to get a sense of how high the bottom of her feet would get on the moon.  A. was impressed.