100th Day of School

Hip, hip hooray! Thursday was our 100th day of school! We've been counting the days since school began. Each day we add a circle to our Counting Caterpillar. This year, we made a new AB color pattern every tenth day. We used a star to commemorate the 100th day. We've already decided to continue to add to the caterpillar each day to see how long it will be by the end of school. On Monday, we'll decide how we'll proceed with adding to him. I'll let them vote to see if the want to add colors randomly or if the wish to try a more complex pattern.

I asked each student to do a little "homework". We decided to make a 100th Day Trail Mix so they were asked to find one hundred edible items and count them with a family member to bring in to share. We put everything together and had the trail mix for snack. This year, we had an overabundance of small candies, and very little filler, so we had to add a little filler.

Eventually, it looked like this:

Our Morning Message was about our Hundredth Day. The students took turns circling or writing an "H" on the whiteboard.

We made these cute headbands from Making Learning Fun for the 100th Day celebration. In the background, you can see more of the patterning of the Counting Caterpillar.

We made a collage of 100 small items glued to the number 100 on construction paper.

Our Show and Tell Challenge this week was to bring in 10 of a small item that we could count together. I love the creativity of some of the "shares"!

Personalize your own free picture slideshow

We illustrated what we thought we'd look like when we are 100 years old. One of my friends drew "peg legs" because "when you get old, your legs sometimes don't work no more. You have to get pegs like the pirates!" and another included a cane and eyeglasses. (The pictures were drawn in colored pencils and were too light to show up in the photos. ;(  )We read the poem "100 Days of School" by Songs 4 Teachers. It's available on the abcteach website, but you can download it from here.

Here are some of our favorite 100th Day books:






















Our "grand finale" was a pizza party. It always surprises me how much pizza 20 pre-k kids can eat!

I'd love for you to comment or leave a link showing how you celebrate the 100th day!

Counting Caterpillar

Here's a couple of pictures to show how our Counting Caterpillar has grown!

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!