Home : 2002 : April : 11
Circles
By Elaine
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Lona,Are you thinking of this as a lesson for 3rd graders? I've not taught 3rd, but what does your curriculum objectives indicate 3rd graders need to know about circles? A co-worker and I read the book to a joint | session of our 4th/5th graders with the purpose of developing a formula for finding the circumference of any circle. We used the vocab. from the book -- circumference and diameter -- and all sorts of round objects from very large to medium to small. Student pairs measured the circumference of their object and the diameter. We made a data chart recording each of these two measurements | |
and included a column for dividing circumference divided by diameter. Then we discovered that all the quotients were very close to 3.14 which is of course pi. Using what we already knew about fact families, we generalized that if C divided by D = pi, then pi times D = C. It was a bit of a stretch for the 4th graders, and in fact they were not included in the development or use of the formula. They were just part of the discovery of the relationship that exits between the circumference of a circle and its diameter. Elaine
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