100th Day Ideas

Need ideas for your 100th day celebration? Joan Holub, the illustrator of "The 100th Day of School" has a list of 300 ideas on her website. Here is the address: http://www.joanholub.com/100thDay.html 

Some of the ideas that I liked are:

• Writing "100 Reasons We Like School"
• Estimation: Which of the 3 jars contains 100 small items?   One with exactly 100, one with 10 more than 100, one with 10 less than 100. Each jar should have the same item such as candy corn, popcorn, small marshmallows. Label each jar Jar A, Jar B, Jar C.
• Build a structure with 100 small brightly colored cups
• Drawing a picture of what the child will look like "When I am 100 years old."
• Count 100 objects from our math center. (unifix cubes, pattern blocks, shells, caps, etc.) by making 10 piles of 10. Then the 100 objects are placed in a plastic bag. When everyone is finished we gather around the balance scale and estimate if 100 pattern blocks will weigh more/less than 100 cubes. Select one object to remain constant and  weigh everything against that constant.
• Complete and illustrate the following sentence frame: I could eat 100 _____but I could never eat 100 ______.  For example: I could eat 100 chocolate chips, but I could never eat 100 chocolate chip cookies.
• Our class went outside in the snow and made 100 snowballs. (Which are usually strictly forbidden!) Before we made the snowballs the children figured out how many snowballs each of us would have to make. We brought the snowballs inside and let them melt after we predicted how much water would result from the snowballs melting using various size jars that we had been using for other estimating activities.
• Having a family 100 Day Night, with the room set up with centers. One of the centers is to draw your family on blank paper doll cutouts. Then they had a bulletin board titled: 100 People We Know. They said the students loved finding their families on the board.

Need more ideas? Check out one of my favorite websites:  mathwire.com http://mathwire.com/seasonal/100day.html  Just search for 100th day.

What activities do you like to do on this day? Remember what Mary Poppins taught us, "That a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down in the most delightful way." 

...and "An element of fun makes learning go down in the most delightful way too!"

Deborah Devine