THOMASTON — Today, March 14, is National Pi Day. Not the kind we eat, but the kind we multiply, divide, add and subtract. And there’s a very special meaning to this pi day. Can you guess?  Everything arithmetical was the theme Friday at Lura Libby Elementary School in Thomaston. From 9 to 11 a.m. the kindergarten through fourth-grade students celebrated Pi Day with a variety of math related themes that involved the whole school.

“It’s all about awareness to math,” said Michelle Ford, who teaches fourth-grade math at Lura Libby. “It’s to get kids away from the paper and pencil kind of thing and show them that math is everywhere.”

Ford pointed out that this idea did not represent pi only in the sense of math itself.

“Math is in games, there’s math in magazines, there’s math everywhere,” she said. “The entire K-4 staff and all the students are involved today. We tried this, I don’t know how many years ago, and it has just snowballed and now the kids expect it every year. Math is in art, math is in music and math is in gym and we all do it.”

So what’s so special about this pi day? For starters it’s a 100-year event. Pi is expressed as 3.1415926535897932 etc., etc., for like forever. It is a non-repeating decimal that has been taken out to a million places or so, at one time or another.

The date today is March 14, 2015, and it can be expressed as 3-14-15, or 31415 - aha ha, does your light come on? That’s pi, but it gets better. Look at the next set of numbers and think of them as an expression of time.

March 14, 2015, at 9:25:53 a.m. or p.m. is 3.141592553. Miss the moment and you have to wait 100 years for it to come around again.  

So let’s get back to Lura Libby and their special math day.

Matt Petrie teaches physical education at Lura Libby. His group started out with a large parachute divided into fractions and they learned how all the pieces add up to a whole. The kids also had a blast fluffing the chute and crawling in and out of it.

Aimee Sanfilippo is the school’s administrative assistant. Her group was building catapults.

“It’s an engineering project, so we use lots of math and science,” she said. “They need to look at leverage, force and velocity. They do their own designs and that’s the relationship between math and science.”

Holly Vinal teaches kindergarten, and her students created circle collages. Pi refers to the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.  

“The students will take a shape and try to create something out of it,” said Vinal. “They made a monster, their mom and animals. They just use their creativity to create shapes. They use circles and squares, but a circle is the template.”

Students switched classrooms every 30 minutes so they all got a chance to try their math skills at a variety of projects.

There were pattern butterflies where the wings had to be symmetrical, windsocks made from the numbers comprising pi, board games that involved numbers and strategy to play such as Mancala and numbers bingo, as well as tangrams that made shapes out of numbers.

There was a math scavenger hunt in which students used magazines to find the numbers they were looking for. They had to cut out the example to prove they found it.

Probably the most imaginative of all the rooms was the one that featured Math Jeopardy. It was a take off of the popular TV game show where contestants answer increasingly difficult questions whose values increase with the question.

Three teams were all answering questions that appeared from a computer generated game board projected on the blackboard. A lot of the questions involved thought and it was surprising to this reporter that the students were answering them with ease.

As the students changed classes they could be heard saying, “that was the coolest,” “that was awesome” and “this is the funnest day ever.” It was a good day of math, and pi, for the students of Lura Libby Elementary School.

Contact Chris Wolf at news@penbaypilot.com