Hip Hip Hooray! It's the 100th Day!

It was a momentous occasion in my classroom today--- we celebrated our 100th day of school!

We have worked hard to make this a special day in our class. On the first day of school, we talked about some of the events we would experience in our Pre-K year, I explained we would count our days and have a party on the 100th day. One of my sweet little girls came eagerly to school on the second day and said, "My daddy's getting pizza for our party on the 100th day." I knew her family owned a pizza place, but I didn't want to get my hopes up. I really thought she would forget as time went on, but she frequently would "remind me" about her promise. Today, her family very generously donated and delivered pizzas for our party. It was a such a treat!

We made a snack mix today, using 10 each of items like M&M's, Cheerios, Goldfish, raisins, etc. The children counted and made their mix. We did is as a whole group activity this year. I didn't think it went as well as when I have small groups in sort of an assembly line. I'll try to remember that for next year!

We made crowns with sentence strips with a large 100 stapled on and decorated them with whatever they students wanted to use. Some colored with markers or crayons, some used collage materials.

Today we read several books, but apparently I put some of my favorites away safely and will probably find them next month! Some of the titles we read were "100th Day of School" by

Angela Shelf Medearis and "100 Hungry Ants" by Elinor J Pinczes. I'll definitely find "100th Day Worries" by Margery Cuyler and "Fluffy's 100th Day of School" by Kate Mcmullan in time for next year!

I have a caterpillar that we have added to since the first day of school. The picture above was taken the 2nd week, so he has gotten considerably longer and his body trails all over our circle time area. I'll try to post a picture later of how much he's grown. We have had a lot of fun learning with the "Counting Caterpillar". Our "Counting Caterpillar" has opened the door for many "teachable moments". We've counted, used one-to-one correspondence, patterned, predicted and had many talks about large numbers.

Each year, the Governor chooses a book and gives it to all students enrolled in Ga. Pre-K. This year's book, "How Much is a Million" by David M. Schwartz has posed a particular challenge. We were asked to extend the book by participating in numerous activities to correlate to the book. I felt that this would be difficult, since so much of the suggested activities are geared to a MUCH older audience. We are in Pre-K, and many are struggling with the barest of number sense. I did manage to find some thing to extend our understanding. I discovered and ordered "How Big is a Million?" by Anna Milbourne. We have collected pennies for the Governor's campaign (over 3000 thus far), counted the stair steps we walked in a week, counted with our families for "homework" and counted everything imaginable!

Now that tomorrow will be day 101, the party will be over, but the fun continues. We will continue to pattern, count and do various activities each day as we add numbers to him to see how long he will get. (I'm not telling them that I know that he will grow to be 180 days long!