100 Days of School!

We were definitely excited when we got the news from the older students that the 100th day of school was approaching quickly. Large numbers like 100 can feel abstract to our youngest students, so we spent the week before the big celebration manipulating objects in groups of 100 and thinking about the number in different contexts. One day, we were wondering, if you could wish for 100 of something, what would it be? You can see by our answers that we’re working on the concept of realism - we spent a lot of time discussing how much work 100 unicorns or dogs or kittens would be! On Friday, our 100th day, the Fungi Friends were eager to explore the offerings curated by the older students. They also documented their own work with digital cameras, drawing on the skills they had been practicing on previous Fridays. One particular favorite activity was the 100 day workout, which we have shared here in case you want to try at home - if you can make it through the 10x10, wait until you get to 100 seconds of jumping :) We discovered that “pump up” music gave us the energy we needed! As always, we enjoyed collaborating with teachers and students who we don’t always get to see on a day-to-day basis, as we watched and listened to our second batch of sap boil down.

One hundred is an important number in the Neighborhood, so we were thrilled when we found out the 100th day of school was coming up. Many thanks to the Barn Owls for keeping track! For much of the school year we’ve been exploring hundreds charts to work on number recognition, notice patterns in the rows and columns, work on one-to-one correspondence and fine motor development by counting small objects, use them for calculating addition and subtraction problems, and even explore place value. The week leading up to the 100th day was like an extravaganza of the many ways we’ve been playing with the number one hundred. We worked together to cover hundreds charts with loose parts from our dramatic play kitchen (We have 254 buttons, 120 tiny pinecones, and 182 tiny seashells!), filled in missing number hundreds charts (and even totally blank hundreds charts), we played dice games using hundreds charts, and made pictures using color-by-number hundreds charts. 

Our most exciting project was preparing for our 100th day Links All-School Choice Time. Kittens and Robins worked either alone or with a friend to count one hundred pieces of a variety of our favorite building materials. We worked with Legos, Brain Flakes, Magna Tiles, and wooden blocks. Each child or partnership found different strategies for how to keep track of such a large number of building materials. We found that tiny Legos fit on hundreds charts. Magna Tiles could be stacked in ten piles of ten. Brain Flakes worked best when stacked in twenty stacks of five. Wooden blocks could be grouped in five piles of twenty. The air was buzzing with little voices counting by ones and skip counting by fives, tens or twenties (building those pre-multiplication skills). The morning of the 100th day, during Soji time, the Neighborhood set up an invitation to build for the whole school to enjoy, complete with kid-made signs and cameras for friends to take pictures of their buildings. It was so fun building with Downstairs and Carriage House friends, and the creations were incredible! We also set up a puzzle station with one hundred piece puzzles, and got help from friends of all ages to complete a list of one hundred rhyming words.

The Barn Owls have been keeping track of the number of days we have been in school since our first day, back in September! As the 100th day approached they eagerly counted down the days left until the BIG 1-0-0! (There may have even been some silly songs created around it!) On the day of, The Barn Owls were challenged to demonstrate their knowledge of fire building using 100 pieces of wood. The deal was, they needed to organize the wood in a manner that  clearly “proved” they had 100 pieces - otherwise this mega-fire would not be prepared and ignited! A few friends jumped right in and started to create a web to organize their ideas. Then, it was time to estimate and sort different sizes of firewood, from kindling to split logs. Once this was done, they started to count them, writing each number in sharpie on the pieces of wood!  But alas - they forgot to sort the numbered pieces, so that plan became a frustratingly inefficient way to prove they had 100 pieces! Finally, they figured out how to sort the sticks into groups of 5, from smallest to largest, and then number each bundle with chalk. But alas- again! They were out of time. The challenge was accomplished but the fire had to wait! Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” was our theme song, playing on repeat the entire time - this turned out to be quite fitting for the occasion.