We love learning with LEGO bricks in our home!
It seems that we have integrated LEGO learning into every subject area of our homeschool, into every holiday of the year, and into every love my child has ever had.
Well, celebrating Pi Day (March 14 - 3.14) is no different.
Let's commemorate this day with a fun LEGO activity, shall we?
The LEGO Pi Skyline
Here is what happened in our house:
It all started on Pi Day (3.14). I thought it would be fun to commemorate the day with an art activity. Big sister (12) joined in for this simple and effective Pi Skyline from What We Do All Day. (My daughter's is on the top - it's a night skyline. Grant's is on the bottom.)
This is a super easy and fun activity - I highly recommend!
I didn't have intentions of going any further with Pi. At this age, it's simply enough that my son knows our Classical Conversations memory work surrounding Pi:
The area of a circle equals Pi (3.14) times the radius squared.
The circumference of a circle equals two times Pi (3.14) times the radius.
What happens, however, when you have an intense kid in the house, is sometimes a concept like this MUST be explored further because their brain won't rest until they know ALL the facts.
As presentation time for Classical Conversations time rolled around, Grant was looking at one of his green base plates (do you own base plates from LEGO® Education? they come in very handy!) and said, "I could make the Pi skyline out of LEGOS."
I've learned to respond like this:
"Show me!"
And he did.
He simply took each number in Pi and built a LEGO building with that number of bricks as its height. (You can see he got as far as the 9 at the end - second to last digit - of the first line in the picture above.)
So simple and SO effective.
{Finding a lot of simple bricks in your child's LEGO collection might be hard. I recommend having a Basic Brick Set on hand for math and activities like this. We keep all of these bricks in our small Lay-n-Go and pull it out when needed. Easy.}
In order to create a presentation surrounding this, we did a little bit of research on Pi. This video about the history of Pi was VERY interesting. We couldn't believe there is a Pi 1,000 club - where members can recite the first 1,000 digits of Pi.
I've created a simple download for you to print and give to your LEGO lover.
The sky is the limit! (Literally)
Isn't my LEGO® lover cute --- he's a bit older than this now and still builds LEGOS daily!
2021 Update:
The original nine-year-old is now sixteen and works at a local independent retailer of LEGO bricks. Needless to say, he’s still very much obsessed with LEGO and created a video tutorial for the LEGO Pi Skyline! Enjoy!
