The 100th Day of School is coming up at many schools, and this is cause for celebration. How is your school celebrating?
As a kindergartner, my daughter is experiencing her first 100th Day of School celebration. Her homework over the weekend was to collect 100 things and arrange them into a display. She chose beads and strung them 10 at a time on 10 little snippets of beading wire. She taped them onto a colorful paper plate, sticking them straight up in the air like an odd little 3-dimensional flower garden. She counted by tens as she measured her progress along the way. 70 beads done and 30 to go makes 100. There’s a lot of math that goes on in these 100 collections.
How can you challenge older students? One possibility is to ask them what other numbers they could count by, other than 10’s and 5’s. Or, as my fiendishly complicated son suggested as he watched his little sister, count by primes. (He’s a senior in high school, which places him on the other tail end of the public school experience.)
For more complex problems, try asking time conversion questions based on 100. - If you were 100 months old, how many years old would you be?
- If you were 100 days old, how many months would that be? How about weeks?
- If a baby were 100 hours old, how many days would that be?
- When you reach 100 years, how many months will you be? Days? Weeks? Minutes?
- Not tough enough? Then ask them about seconds. ;-)
Do some 100 measuring. First estimate how big 100 inches, centimeters, or feet are, then measure it. Measure 100 millimeters on a piece of cardboard or heavy paper and cut the measure out. Then do some measuring, counting by hundreds. Convert the lengths to centimeters or meters and you have a little lesson on the metric system. What’s easier, converting within the metric system or the English unit system of inches, feet and yards? Which system is a more suitable choice for celebrating the One Hundredth Day?
By searching for “100th Day of School” on the internet, you can easily find a hundred ideas of how to celebrate. Here are a couple which focus on math:
http://www.globalclassroom.org/100days.html
http://mathforum.org/t2t/faq/faq.100.html
How will you celebrate the 100th Day of School? Send me your pictures or post your ideas and we’ll have a little celebration right here.
To your student’s success!
Rita
