I Am What I Teach: 100th Day of School

There are so many fun ideas out there to celebrate this day, but do you know why it's a BIG deal?!

All the hype comes from how schools get their base funding for the following year, and that's by students count. I have heard it has changed in the last few years but it has to do with an average of the number of students at school up to the 100th day, and then the 100th day, in all of it's glory, is factored in too. So to get more money we need more kids in attendance on that day, and to get more kids to school (and parents on board) we need to advertise FUN, FUN, FUN!

So the short version of my explanation: Get those kids to school and the schools will be given the base amount of money they should be given anyway!!

I have always done activities to go with this day including; 10 exercises 10 times, filling in 100 charts, counting 100 of something, making snacks with 10 sets of 10 cereals, reading for 100 minutes, writing a 100 word story, etc. This year Day 100 landed on a Wednesday, and that's a half day in my district so I wanted to be simple. My school encouraged (and rewarded) students for dressing up as a 100 year old. I was more than happy to wear a house coat and slippers all day, of course with a professional outfit underneath since we had a district meeting after school.

I encouraged the students to bring in 100 of something yummy and healthy that we could all share.

Here's what I got:
100 packages of fruit snacks
3 Bags of Pretzel Sticks

I cleaned out my pantry and found:
Cheerios
Wheat Thins
Chocolate Chips
Candy Corns
Marshmallows
Orange Tic-Tacs

It was a perfect assortment for REAL math! So then I found a lovely check list online and we were set. I was excited for the opportunity to do some addition with both finding the missing addend and finding the sum. Counting by 10's is soooo 1st grade anyway :)

We started with the fruit snacks, each kid got 2 packs and had to add them to their list and count them. They ranged from 18 - 14 so to even them all out I told them they needed to get candy corns to get their snack cup up to 25 items. Next was the chocolate chips, they had to add 10 bringing the total to 35. Then I gave them each 3 tic-tacs, and we were at 38. To get to 50 they each added 12 pretzel sticks. Then another 10, this time of marshmallows, for a quicker equation, and we were at 60. 5 Wheat Thins since the bag wasn't huge, and now we have 65 snacks. What's left? Cheerios! Add in 35, good thing they are small and there are tons of them in a bag, and the cups were overflowing and we had 100 treats!!