100th Day of School

Today was our 100th day of school at UMS, which is always a lot of fun in first grade! Our class spent the whole day doing reading, math, and art activities related to the number 100.

We started the day with a math puzzle activity creating numbers within 100 during our morning meeting. Students each had a card that said something like, "I have the number 23. Who has the number that is three tens and four ones?" One student started us off by coming to the front of the room and reading their card out loud. After reading the card that student would build the number in the riddle while all of the other students worked to figure out if the number in the riddle was the number on their card (three tens and four ones = 34). The student with the number matching the riddle then came up to the front of the room and read their riddle to the class, ie: "I have the number 34. Who has the number that is nine tens and two ones?" Everyone got a turn to come up to the front of the room to read their riddle to the class then build the mystery number while the rest of the class solved the problem along with them. We had a lot of fun with this game!

After morning meeting we started a fun math estimation sheet that we did bits of throughout the day. The sheet asked the questions, "How many times do you think you can (write your name, hop on one leg, say the alphabet, count to 10, blink your eyes, clap your hands, etc) in 100 seconds?" For each question students wrote down an estimate of the number of times they thought they could do each thing in 100 seconds. We then did each of the activities on the sheet (a couple at a time throughout the day) for 100 seconds each, recorded our actual totals, compared them to our estimates, and figured out which ones we were able to do the most and least of in 100 seconds.

Our big fun for the day was doing station rotations between all four first grade classrooms! Each classroom teacher prepared an activity around the number 100 and classes took turns rotating between the four classrooms so that each class was able to do each activity! Classes spent about 30 minutes in each classroom working on the projects. When students went to Mrs. Hughes room they spent their time building with 100 giant red cups! In Ms. Barnett's room they pasted the number 100 in large cut out numbers on a piece of poster paper then incorporated the number into a drawing (some made the zeros in 100 into glasses on a person, eyes on an animal, windows on a car or house, ponds in a park, etc - they were all very unique and creative). In Mrs. Sorenson's room the students made 100th day crowns where they made groups of tallies, practicing counting to 100 by 5s and adding these to their crown. In my classroom students made a pretend gumball machine where they used Q tips to paint 100 dots (the gumballs) onto their gumball machine in groups of 10 (ten dots in each of ten colors).

Our class read a poem and a book both about the 100th day of school and practiced counting both forward from zero to 100 and backward from 100 to zero by 2, 5, and 10. We had a very fun day full of the number 100! Below are photos of our class taken throughout the day!

A picture slideshow by Smilebox