It was the much-anticipated Pi Day in Niall's class at school today! Not the real Pi Day, clearly, which is 3/14 (aka 3.14). But since that's on a Sunday this year, they celebrated on the Friday before. All the kids got these very cool Pi shirts, which Niall was proudly wearing when I picked him up from Extended Day.They did all kinds of fun pi-related activities (like measuring radii and circumferences of enormous string circles on the floor and figuring out the formulas for area), building up to the Main Event which was seeing how many digits of pi each child could recite. There were prizes for various numbers of digits (starting at 10 digits) - Niall got up to 26, based on spending one evening at Grandma's memorizing digits (then he kind of lost interest). Some kids made it to 50 or even 60.
But the ultimate goal was to reach 100 digits, with the prize being teacher Alice dressing up like a chicken and letting the child throw a pie in her face. And for the first year ever, one of the kids made it to (and past!) 100! Very exciting all around. Eugene enjoyed making a whip cream pie and "pie-ing" Alice with it, while the other kids hooted and hollered.
I wonder if Niall will be motivated to memorize a few more digits next year and perhaps earn the honor of pie-ing Alice himself? He's perfectly capable of it, but there are so many *interesting* things to learn, he didn't feel like adding all those digits into his head. Or...not this year anyway. :-)
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