Happy, Happy 100th Day!

Can you believe it? The school year is over 1/2 over!!! This past summer I presented at the Common Core Academy in Chicago for SDE. As part of the tuition for that event, the participants are receiving a series of videos by different presenters throughout the year. When SDE asked me to do the video on Day 100, I was so excited! Now, before you ask, I don’t have access to that video. But, what I do have are the slides from my power point I used to make the video. It was kinda weird to do the video! I literally had to pretend that I was presenting to people, but there was only me and the camera. I guess that is the closest I will ever get to being a tv star! lol
Here are a few of the ideas that I shared in the video.
We start the day off with our Zero, the Hero breakfast with a surprise visit from our very own Zero, the Hero and his two helpers. This dad is super cool. He made his own outfit as well as those for his twins who helped by being the zeros! Our breakfast was a graham cracker stick and 2 powdered doughnuts. Now, you can go all “Betty Crocker” and cook sausage and dollar sized pancakes, but I can barely turn on an oven!

He was great to have all the kinders in the whole school participate in activities 100 times! That man has a lot of energy! Once in the class, here are a few of the activities we did:

We made a Zero, the Hero Glyph. We read a recipe and then used our tens frames to make a Day 100 snack.

I hid 100 chocolate kisses around the room. On the bottom of each chick I put a yellow sticky dot and drew the face of the chick. Then the kids had to find them around the room. As they found them, we put them on the wolf’s 100s chart.  This is a great activity for the book The Wolf’s Chicken Stew. You can search on Youtube and find the book being read aloud. We counted 10 groups of 10 different colors of fruit loops to make a necklace.
We used number bonds to make combinations of 10 using two different colors of fruit loop zeros.

Then, we used those number combinations to make our hats. We dressed up like we were 100 years old. Yep, that’s me as a 100 year old man getting my groove on!
These ideas, and others, are from the Happy, Happy 100th Day unit that I wrote with my friend Wendy Gilstrap. I once heard a teacher say she couldn’t do fun things because she had to teach common core. The Common Core standards for each of these activities are included in the pack. We have to look outside of the little box and figure out ways to teach the standards in a way that is cognitively appropriate and engaging for our little learners. Don’t let the Common Core rob your joy!
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