Kacsko's Kiddos: When the 100th Day Meets Valentine's Day

I meant to look quizzical here, but it came off more as if I'm

pondering if we would ever see the 100th day of school.

We began the month of February celebrating the upcoming 100th day of school. It took us 2 weeks to get there, but we finally made it! All of our whole-group reading and writing times and many of our centers were centered on the number 100.
We began the week by bringing in our bags of 100 things. The students wrote in their journals about what they brought and we displayed them on the hallway bulletin board for the whole school to see.

Then there were three more days of snow........

After that (it was a Friday) we read the book, Bunny Money (a Max and Ruby book) and the students discussed and wrote about what they would do with $100. I can tell you this, we don't have a lot of 'savers' in either class. (Then there was one more day of white stuff).....

The third day of this unit was the actual 100th day. The students made art out of the number 100

and we hopped 100 feet down the hallway.

We counted to 100 in a whole new way with a music video from youtube. And we wrote 100 words in a 'write the room' activity. (These are also on display in our hallway).

The next day we counted 100 seconds. Afterward, we discussed what we could and couldn't do in 100 seconds on an anchor chart. I posed two questions centered on one situation. (Could you have a birthday party? Could you sing the birthday song? Could you eat a French fry? Could you eat your whole dinner? Could you play a game of baseball? Could you run the bases?) Then the students wrote about what they could do in 100 seconds. Our final writing activity came after reading a story about a character who travels to many different places. The students wrote about where they would want to spend 100 days. One student said they'd spend it at school. Awww.
And now for the centers....The students used cups to make a 100 cup tower in the block center.

It's amazing how something so cheap and simple can bring such joy and entertainment.
In the word work center, I tried something else with cups that was...well.....less successful. I realized after the first day that it was an activity that would be better for first grade. Each sight word was written on a cup, some more than once. Other cups had easy to read/recognize words such as dog, cat, mom, dad, sat, ran, etc. The students were supposed to put a sentence together, then try to stack the sentence up to read properly. Fail. After two days of centers, I made cards with a picture of a sentence structure already on them so all they had to do was find the words and stack them exactly how the card showed. Fail again. There were just too many cups. It was overwhelming. I will try this again, but with fewer (a lot fewer) cups and in a more structured way.

In the Number Work center, the students had to match up tetris-style shapes to a hundred chart. And they raced their partner to 100 in the Math Games center.

And, instead of puzzles this week, the students made original creations out of 100 q-tips. Again, cheap and simple=tons of fun.

Our Fun Friday was extra fun as it was Valentine's Day. This was the first year I let the children look through their boxes before taking them home and I will do this every year from now on. The joy on their faces was priceless. It was like Christmas morning in our classroom! I'll leave you with pics from our Valentine's activities.