100 Days! Hooray!

We celebrated our 100th day of school a few weeks back but I haven't had time to post about it yet. So, here goes! We started our day by having the students write one sentence about what age they currently are and what they are like now. For example, they wrote things like "I am age 6 and I am a good student." Then then wrote another sentence pretending to be 100 years old. They wrote past tense sentences listing off some of their future accomplishments such as "I am 100 years old and I have been a doctor and a father to four children." We talk a great deal in our class about the importance of going to college so I used this lesson to reinforce the concept that you can be anything you want to be as long as you work hard. It was neat to see where the students hope to be when they are 100. They then drew pictures of themselves at these ages. Unfortunately, I did not remember to take pictures of these before I sent them home. :(

For math, we read 100 Day Worries by Margery Cuyler. Just like in the book, the students were asked to bring in a bag of 100 small items. They brought in pencils, pennies, beans, cereal, pins, etc. The students sat in a large circle and created sets of tens out of their items. The students then took a gallery walk around the circle counting the items by tens. We had a discussion about how some of the groups looked larger and some looked smaller but they all had 100 items. It was a great way for students to understand that the size of the objects did not change the quantity.

Symmetrical Butterflies

As a part of our study on life cycles, we discussed how most butterflies are symmetrical - their wings look the same on both side. To help the students visualize this, they cut out a pattern of a butterfly and folded it in half. We then put dobs of paint on just one side of the butterfly. The students then folded the other half on top of it to smoosh all of the paint. They then opened the butterfly to see that both sides now looked the same. I related this mini-lesson back to math and patterns. We talked about how the paint formed a pattern on the butterfly. We then added the butterflies to our garden display in the hallway.

100th Day of School

With all of the recent school closings due to weather, I wasn't sure if we were ever going to make it to the 100th Day of School! But, we did and we had a great time exploring the number 100. The students began their day by decorating crowns to show they were the "Kings and Queens of 100."  Then in math the students took turns being leaders to sort through number cards to 100. They would hold up the card for their classmates and ask if the number was even or odd. They would then color-code the number with a sticker to show if it was even or odd. Every time the students completed a set of ten numbers, they would ask a volunteer to create a row of those numbers from least to greatest. As they continued to add rows, they began to see a pattern of skip counting emerge. Once completed, they realized that they had made a 100 chart similar to the one we use in calendar everyday. After completing this activity, the students made predictions about how far they thought 100 tiles would be from our classroom door. Using the same cards from our previous lesson, the students taped the cards down, one per tile, in the hallway to reinforce the skip counting pattern and to test their predictions. The students were surprised to see that 100 tiles reached all the way to the nurse's office. After taping down the number cards, the students then went back and added another color sticker to show skip counting by fives.

Free picture collage made with Smilebox

100th Day Fun

Today our countdown to the 100th day of school officially ended! To celebrate this special day of school, we began with our 100th day project presentations during our reading block. The students made creative projects including 100 piece puzzles, addition problems out of beans, Valentine hearts, a toy box, eyeball hats and shirts, and much more. During math, the students traced their shoes, cut them out, and created rows of ten until they had a total of 100 shoe patterns. We counted the ten longs as a class and then took them into the hallway to see how far 100 steps would be. The students made predictions to see if our set of footprints would go farther down the hallway than the other first grade classes. The students predicted that our steps would go further because our classroom was closer to the other hallways...they were right! Below you can enjoy a collage of some of our 100 day fun! To enlarge the pictures, click on the magnifying glass.

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