Pi Day Party

From 8am to 2pm last Thursday, my mom, myself, my grandfather, two school teachers, and ten other homeschooling moms and dads got together and put on a huge math-related event for about 50 local homeschooled kids.

Why Thursday? Why, because it was March 14^th, or 3/14, affectionally named pi day.

Spring break is the perfect time for events, trips, or projects. I didn’t go anywhere except home, but a lot happened. My mom always throws a pi day party, and this year, without even remembering I would be home to help her prepare, she decided she was going to go all out. The goal of the party was simply to get kids excited about math. Turns out, it wasn’t hard. 

We sorted the kids by age groups in the beginning of the morning and sent them with different people to work on different math-related projects. At one station, each group learned about the unit circle and the significance of the irrational number pi from my mom. At another, they used compasses and protractors to create art. At a third, they heard my grandfather, an engineer who had retired from Eastman, talk about the purpose of math and its uses in every-day life. And at a fourth, they threw frisbees and rolled bike wheels and learned about the aerodynamics of spinning circles.

I myself spent the morning teaching each group how to use an abacus. Mom wrote to her favorite math curriculum company and asked them to sponsor our event, and when they agreed, they sent us (among other things) six abacuses to give away as door prizes. We own some that we use in our own math curriculums, so it was fun (and also easy) to write a short lesson about how (and why) to use an abacus.

After lunch, we had a math scavenger hunt. This time, children were divided up into teams of all ages, and sent around the yard to perform different math-related tasks or solve different math problems. I worked with my grandfather, another engineering dad, and my oldest younger brother (Peter) to judge the kids on each task and award points to each team.

Overall, the party was a huge success! 

Since I was back in town, I also spent 3 hours on Friday volunteering at the hospital. I put together packets for incoming patients in the Wound Care department and sorted and filed employee information in Human Resources.

Colder than the Daffodils

The high today is only 37°. I have just taken a picture of some ETSU daffodils that have keeled over in defeat. The weather clearly intends to bring misery over the entire campus, and it has teamed up with the exam schedule, but the good news is that it has not been working. Most of my classmates are in great spirits, and I have had a good Monday and Tuesday as well. Even though we are all overworked this week, there are only a few more days left until Spring break. 

Most of my college life revolves around doing schoolwork, but I think my Collo blog is supposed to be about my college life outside of schoolwork. I have decided I will only say a couple things about my classes. The best part about learning this semester has been learning with my much beloved teachers. Although I have a lot of difficult classes, my professors are all excellent at communicating the material. My classrooms are always lighthearted and a lot of the students have befriended each other. I hope I will live up to all my professors’ expectations in all my future tests.

I am having a good time trying to learn some German. I am working very hard on numbers, directions, and food. When I am in Austria, I will be very good at paying for things, I will never get lost, and I will be an expert grocery store shopper. I downloaded Duolingo so I can practice German when I am away from my computer. My favorite way to learn, though, is to listen to an audio German lesson while I am playing Minecraft. I’ve spent about 8 hours learning German since February: half with my phone (in random places) and half with a good online curriculum.

I have been to one college event so far this semester, which was the Men and Women in Song concert on February second. The concert was two hours long. It featured many choirs from ETSU and Milligan. I went because a lot of my friends were performing, and enjoyed it very much, which I was not surprised by. Since I went by myself, I decided I would sit in the front and in the middle. I am not interested in staying home from a concert I will like just because I will not know anyone in the audience, and I am never interested in sitting in any back rows at all.

The last good thing I would like to write about is my new ear warmer. I used some fluffy blue yarn that I bought two years ago when I really shouldn’t have been in the yarn store, and I knitted it in just over a day. I wanted to make it into a hat, but I kept growing dissatisfied with it and restarting. Did I give up? No. I was just cold when I woke up on Monday, so I pulled out the unfinished body of the hat and used the brim to keep myself a little warmer.