100th Day in Pre-K!

On Monday we had our 100th Day of School celebration! Interestingly enough, the two kindergarten classes celebrated their 100th Days on different days last week. Somehow, no one could agree on how many days we have actually been in school!

Since it was also Groundhog Day, we started the day out by reading Let's Celebrate Groundhog Day which is a great nonfiction book for pre-k to 1st grade kiddos.

We made our predictions using my free Groundhog Day Class Prediction Graph pack. My pessimistic kiddos were spot on about their predictions with 2/3s of the class predicting more winter!

Once we had that out of the way it was time for some 100th day fun in the form of 3 new centers:

First up we had Q-tip painting!

The object was to put 10 dots of paint in each square to equal 100 dots. This was a great way for me to assess who still needs practice in making sets and who breezed thru the activity with zero help! The sheet is from Mrs Payton's FREE 100th Day Hooray pack. The kids love anything with paint, and the Q-tips made it that much more engaging!

Our other new center was building with 100 sugar cubes. I'm proud to say that no one was caught nibbling! The kiddos started out with very conservative building ideas, but with experience they were soon astonishing me with their creations!

During our morning center time, the kiddos experimented with basic wall designs.

By the end of our afternoon centers, they had progressed to more complex structures!

One of my 4 year olds built this wonder of symmetry and balance!

Our 3rd special center activity was building with 100 Solo cups. I bought the small size to fit my kiddos' little hands easier.

At first, this little sweetie's focus was on how many cups is in 100, so she tried spreading them on the ground around her.

Soon though, the kiddos were experimenting with various structures.

I loved this little guy's idea to stack the mouths of the cups together.

This smarty got the award for perseverance! His tower was knocked down no less than 3 times by careless classmates, but instead of getting upset he calmly started over each time. He couldn't reach the top layers and had to stand on a chair to place the final 3 cups!

During Math time each kiddo brought 4 crayons to the carpet and we completed this freebie from Fun Classroom Creations together as a whole group. It was a great way to see who had enough mental stamina to follow along for the whole activity, and who had difficulty transcribing what they saw me doing onto their own paper.

The culmination of our day was creating 100th Day hats and eating ice cream! (also from Mrs Payton's FREE 100th Day Hooray pack)

There you have it - simple, fun 100th Day ideas that weren't expensive and required little prep! Those are the best type of celebrations, don't you think?

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!

 

 

100th Day Fun!

We had a wild 100th Day! Our morning was spent on a hidden picture 100 Chart from Katie @ Little Warriors - my students loved it! I adapted it to be more appropriate to our grade level by calling out the numbers by tens and ones - so 68 was 6 tens and eight ones. They were a bit thrown at first but soon caught on. It was such a hit that I will be creating more for them! We also counted to 100 using this video that my kiddos love because at the end it shows 1,000 all the way to 1 billion! I really tricked them by asking what number was in the one's place while I had the video paused on 1,000,000,000, so now I know we still need a bit of work on that concept!

 We had to fit in a timed math test and a visit to the library before lunch too! In the afternoon we had a power outage - at one point there was talk about sending the kids home! We just rolled with it by opening our blinds and leaving our bathroom door open a crack while using it (it was pitch black inside it since there's no window) but we were having way too much fun to let a little lack of electricity send us home! Here's how we spent most of the afternoon:

Each group was 4-5 students and had a leader that moderated the group to ensure cooperation. I purposefully chose my peacekeepers for this task as I knew they could successfully negotiate any quarrels among their teammates. Each group had to trace and cut out the shapes for their project, making sure to keep count. We got a little overzealous on some, and had to remove a few pieces, but that was just another chance to use our subtraction skills! I think our finished projects turned out wonderfully!

 I took a stroll down the hallway to see what the other 1st grade classes had done, and saw that one of my teammates had her students do the 100 object homework project. She had about 70% participation which is fabulous for our school! Here are my 3 favorite projects:

I have another observation next week and I am going to be preparing for it this weekend, so be on the lookout for some freebies! And finally, one of my favorites moments of the day:

Student A: "Who wants to be dumb?" (being silly at lunch time).
Student B: "Not me! I want to be as smart as I can be!"
Student C: "I want to be the smartest man in the whole world!"

Ahh, you gotta love it when they want to learn!

Preparing for the 100th Day! Freebie!

I took the day off today to go to an appointment and to see my daughter in the city spelling bee. She got out on the word "necessary", because she added an extra c. So we've been teasing her all night - it's amazing how many times you can work "necessary" into a conversation. Before you think I'm a meanie for teasing her, it's the best way to deal with loss for her - if we make it funny she gets over it quicker than if we treated her tenderly.

I stopped at my classroom at dismissal to check out how my sub was - it seems she did a great job, so I will have to make sure to put her on our request list! It is amazing how hard it is to come by good subs! We've had subs in our school this year who have told kids that they were stupid for missing words in the school spelling bee, one told a 2nd grader to "shut his big mouth" for talking in the breakfast line, and of course, the infamous sub who didn't read the kindergarten bus list and allowed a non-bus student to get on the bus which resulted in a 2 hour search for the child before he turned up safe and sound at a local daycare!

Of course I had to clean up my room a little and then I decided to prepare some of our things for our 100th day on Friday! I found some blackline drawings and used my Elmo to blow them up on my Smartboard so I could trace them onto butcher paper. I will be putting my kiddos in groups of 4-5 to cut out and glue 100 gumballs in a gumball machine, 100 pepperonis on a pizza, 100 spots on a dalmatian and 100 fish in a fish bowl! Unfortunately we're out of lamination again, so I have to cross my fingers that my creations survive the process in good enough condition to hang up around the school!

Here are some of the other activities I have planned : putting together 100 piece puzzles (bought them at the Dollar Store tonight!), writing 100 word stories, reading 100 books and doing 100 second math drills! I'm always open to new ideas, so if you have a great 100th Day activity, please comment below!

I decided not to have my kiddos do a 100th Day homework project, because unfortunately only about 1/4 would even participate :( We have a big problem with our parental involvement at our school. Remember the sight word packets I made up (this post)? I made up 15 packets, thinking optimistically. Out of 300+ students, only 4 parents showed up! Granted it was held at 8am when most working parents are busy getting ready to go to work, but we also have a large population of unemployed/stay-at-home parents and they didn't attend either. I have voiced concerns in the past that our daytime events exclude our working parents, but I was told that they can just "ask their boss to let them come in 1/2 hour late". Hmm, reality check folks! In this economic climate, is a mother of 4 who is the sole income earner in the family going to potentially jeopardize her job by asking for time off for school functions or is she going to save that time off for when the kids are sick?

Anyways, here are some of the books I purchased for our 100th Day - I will be reading these all week, and I chose a variety of reading levels, because I have kiddos still reading at a kindergarten level, while others are reading at a 5th grade level!


I also made a quick "make a word" page for using the letters in "one hundred days" as well as a graphing packet based on the question "Would you eat 100?" Please leave me a comment if you use it, I love to know if my creations are helpful! I know the preview looks wonky, but I promise that the actual file is fine - I'm not sure why it always looks messed up, if anyone knows how to fix previews like that please let me know!

100th day