100th Day Projects

We had our 100th Day on Monday, a bit late because of 2 snow days last week. Since it was so close to Valentine's Day I decided not to do any type of party or have any food. It seems like when we try to do something like 100th Day Trail Mix or necklaces with 100 Froot Loops etc it becomes more about the food than the actual day. This year the only thing we did was create our 100th Day projects. Since I have so many kiddos this year, we had to make 7! Here's what we did:

In advance, I traced all 7 pictures (Dalmatian, gumball machine, sunflower, cherry tree, pizza, fishbowl and fish) onto colored butcher paper by projecting the images on my Smartboard. This took about an hour. The next day I spent another hour after school outlining all the pictures with a Sharpie marker. The 3rd day I cut out all the pictures - note for next year, that sunflower took FOREVER to cut out!

 

On the 100th Day I let each student choose which project they wanted to work on. Since I had 28 kiddos that day it worked out perfectly with 4 kids per project. Once they were in their groups they had to choose a team leader who would be the person in charge of assigning tasks and securing supplies. Then they wrote up a list of what they needed - scissors, glue the different colors of construction paper they wanted, and items to trace to make their pieces.

 

Once they had their supplies they got to work tracing, cutting and counting, and then traced, cut and counted some more! They were very surprised by how long it took them to get to 100! We had read Counting Coconuts by Wendy Silvano last week. It is a great book for skip counting, and by referring back to it, each group came to the conclusion that it would be easiest to make 10 piles of 10.

Once each group had their 100 pieces cut out, I gave them their butcher paper picture. This is where I'll give further guidance next year because very few of my groups made a plan before slapping the glue on. They soon realized that though 100 seems like a lot, they didn't have enough to cover the whole picture. Some of them wanted to cut out more pieces to fill in the gaps!

Our projects took about 3 hours, broken up by lunch, recess and bathroom breaks. It was completely cost-free for me (I have a TON of construction paper!) and only took 3 hours to prep. My students didn't miss the crowns and snacks at all and the team work, planning, skip counting and number sense practice they got was priceless! Here are our finished projects:

This group traced quarters for their gumballs. They were disappointed that even though they had 100 it didn't fill their machine. They looked at the fishbowl that could barely hold 100 fish and quickly realized it was the size that mattered! Then they started scouring the room for other circular things - discussing which would be too big to fit 100 (paint bottle) and which too small (water bottle cap).  What a great reinforcement of number sense and preview of volume!