100 Days Smarter

My oh my! My students celebrated 100 days of school (with great enthusiasm) by dressing up as if they were 100 years old, making construction paper chains, and sorting objects into groups of 10 (which they happily sorted and re-sorted) until they reached 100.

Some of the objects they counted were marshmallows, M&M's, pennies, snap cubes, assorted counters, buttons, square tiles, lollipops, and shapes. What I liked watching was the light bulbs going off when some students used different strategies for keeping the objects in groups of 10 when some of the objects would not fit exactly in the round circles and interfered with their counting.

Notice their groupings changed from scattered objects (on the left) to organized groups (on the right) without any prompting from me!








I sent home a take-home project for them to complete. They were to place 100 objects on a large outline. Some understood the concept, and some apparently did not :)

I also created a large circle map that had the sentence starter "If I had $100, I would..." to which I solicited responses from all four first grade classes.

Some of my favorite responses were:

• "give sister money to trade rooms"
• "mail it to everyone to make them happy" (aww...)
• "spend it on a sculpture"
• "save it"
• "buy a mansion" (If only $100 went that far...)

I hoped you enjoyed hearing a little (or a lot) about our 100th day of school!

What is your/ your students' favorite 100th day activity?