100th Day-Thursday, February 26, 2009

Today was the 100th day of school! We are more than half way done with first grade! The day began with bonus P.E.

When we came back to the room, we did lots of activities to celebrate the day and all we have learned.

We started by seeing how many times we could write our first name in 100 seconds. Before we started, everyone made an estimate. Afterwards, we counted the number of times we wrote our name. Zoe had the most. She wrote it 35 times in 100 seconds. We think it helped that her name has 3 letters.

We are making 2 class books. One includes our responses to the question: “If you could have 100 of anything, what would it be?” and the other tells what we would do if we had $100. Ms. Stern even gave us a $100 for inspiration.

If I could have 100 of anything I would want 100 slices of pizza to eat because they would be yummy!

If I had $100 I would spend it on a house in Disney World. You can swim all the time and you can get a big tan there. And it is my favorite place to go to. -Isabella

If I had $100 I would buy a lot of candy. It is sweet and sugary. I would eat it every day. -Kevin

If I had $100 I'd get a kitten from Pets Place 2 because they are soft like a feather. -Carly

If I had $100 I would go to the mall and buy a pretty dress because I would be fantastic. -Mia

If I had $100 I would buy a band and I would make cd's. I would get a drummer and a singer and a guitar player. -Kaitlyn

During math, Ms. Stern gave us a challenge: see how many addition problems (out of a total of 100) we could solve in 10 minutes. The goal was to be accurate (get more correct) and not careless so answering fewer questions correctly is more important than answering more and getting less right.

Everyone did a great job! We are going to continue practicing by doing this once each week. The more we practice, the better we should get. Ms. Stern expects to see each person grow from week to week, regardless of how many we got today. A few children got 95 or more correct and are already moving to subtraction! Wow!

This afternoon, we worked in groups to try to put together 100 piece puzzles. Everyone picked a popsicle stick with an animal on it. That decided which puzzle we were going to work on. There was a chimpanzee, parrot, tiger, pig, and kitten. We discussed some strategies to use before staring. Using the picture on the box was one. Finding the edges was another. Starting with the corners was the third. Many children thought the puzzles were very tricky to do. Some people got frustrated. Ms. Stern discovered that lots of children hadn’t done many puzzles before and explained that they are challenging if you don’t practice and have patience.

Sammy, Zoe, and Kevin worked really well together and complimented each other. Joshua stayed so focused, even after his partners were dismissed. In fact, he completed his puzzle (minus the one missing corner piece that was nowhere to be found!).

Happy 100th day!

PS-We have been checking in with lots of our Flat Stanleys. We always begin by using Google Earth to see the distance we traveled from William O. Schaefer. Then we check out the area and make an inference (Is it a city? Suburb? Rural?) by looking at the surrounding land before finding out about our interesting travels. Google Earth is free software that can be downloaded here.