Kindergarten Pi-Day Activities

When I was telling my sister that I was getting Pi-Day activities ready to share with Firecracker's kindergarten class, she asked me, "What do you tell the kindergarteners about pi?"  (If you've never heard of Pi-Day, you can see my explanation here.)  The answer is not much...understanding the number pi is a bit too advanced for kindergarten.  (Which is probably why I didn't find many kindergarten Pi-Day Activities when I googled it.)  We'll tell them that pi is a number that will be important for circles when they're older...and we'll be celebrating circles and math more than the pi itself.  I figure that the more fun math seems to them now, the better attitude they'll have in the long run. 

So, as promised yesterday, I've got some kindergarten appropriate activities ready to share...and similar to my post yesterday...I've got a book to share for the Read-Along at the end of this post.  These are probably too late for many of you teachers...but maybe they can help some home-schooling and pre-schooling moms out there.

Since celebrating Pi-Day was my idea, I didn't want it to be extra work for Firecracker's teacher.  I brainstormed several ideas and sent them to Firecracker's teacher's, and then she choose the ones that would be most appropriate for her class.  We'll be dividing the class into 3 groups and having them rotate through activities, so there will be about 6 students doing each activity at one time.

Here's what we came up with:

Felt Jack-O-Lanterns & Shape Toy

We've been reading lots of pumpkin books lately, so when I saw these felt Jack-O-Lanterns posted by Heather on Camp Slop.  She made hers into a game, but I wasn't feeling quite that ambitious the morning I made these.  We did read the book Pumpkin Heads by Wendell Minor which is a really fun book.  It's got simple text and is a Halloween book without being too spooky.  I also had the kids look through the book for ideas to carve onto our pumpkins.