A little confession: I usually let the 100th Day sneak up on me. I am not the best with keeping up with how many days we've been in school. Due to a strict schedule, I've had to give up my calendar routine (I know! No calendar in first grade? That seems sacrilegious!) and with that went the day-counting activities I've always done so this year it could have gone by completely unnoticed. Luckily, I remembered well before the holiday break and put it on the calendar. I may have had to double-check with a kindergarten colleague to make sure I had it right.
This year I wanted to do the 100th Day "right" and keep my focus on fun but educational activities! The point of celebrating it is to 1.) acknowledge that we've been in school for a whole lotta days and 2.) review those counting skills and talk about some larger numbers. My secondary goal was not to have a nervous breakdown prepping materials that we'd only be using for one day. Here are some pictures of what I put together!
First up, math stations! This year I got smart and made a series of math stations that related to our counting standard. I may have cheated a little and put them out in math stations earlier in the week so they would have multiple opportunities to work and play in the stations.
Here is one of them called the 100th Day Dash...it's very similar to a game called Race to 100 that I'm sure you've seen, but instead of kids moving a counter across a hundreds chart they fill their ten frames up with counters or cubes. The thought I had behind this game was for them to see visually that 100 is 10 groups of 10.
Next up, number puzzles. I made a bunch of different puzzles with different skip counting skills. Their job was to re-assemble the puzzles by counting by fives or tens. They LOVED this center even though it was so simple!
Next: Skip counting by 5s to 100. Believe it or not, some of my babies are still struggling with counting by 5s and we still need practice! This station was for them. They had to take their deck of mixed-up cards and lay them out in order. (This would also work on a pocket chart, but I wasn't that feeling that fancy.)
The last station is Piggy Bank Dash. I came up with this game idea all on my own and it was by far the favorite station. They were still begging to play it a week later! The basic idea is that students roll a die and cover that number of spots on their pennies ten frame with pennies. When a student fills up his or her ten frame, they trade their pennies for a dime and put it in the piggy bank. When the piggy bank is full of dimes, they can trade for a dollar and win the game! We have a standard about pennies and dimes in our math standards and our curriculum map doesn't have us covering it until later in the school year. Guess what? I think my kids will remember that 10 pennies equal a dime!
In other parts of the day, we did some writing with a really cute crafitivity. The prompt was "I am rocking this school year!" We brainstormed some things on the rug, but I encouraged them to write their own thoughts down when they got to their seats. I was blown away by their responses. One little friend said "I am rocking this school year because I know a lot of onomatopoeia." Another sweetie said "I am rocking this school year because I have good character." Several kids said "I am rocking this school year because I am reading chapter books!" or "I am reading on a second grade reading level." This was a really fun activity and best of all, there wasn't a lot of prep work involved (printing/copying, mostly-I let the kids do the cutting!)
One of the last things we did before going home was for me to give each one of them a book. Scholastic had the book 100 Snowmen in one of their recent fliers for $1 and I ordered a class set. I want to do this more often-give kids a special book for a holiday or fun day. The $1 books are a great deal, especially if you get them with bonus points, and the kids get SO excited about a new book.
Not pictured are their 100th Day Brag Tags. I gave them a Brag Tag to stick on their necklaces to commemorate their day. I'm not sure which they were more excited about, the book or the Brag Tag!
If you want some of these activities for your own 100th Day fun, everything is now available in my shop! I'd love for you to pop over and take a look. There's more in the pack than I could possibly do in a day, but I'm hoping that next year since I have the math stations already prepped I can incorporate some of the other activities.
Hope your Sunday is relaxing and your Monday mercifully short! :)
