Today we celebrated 100 days of school. Technically it was our 101st day, but as I had a workshop yesterday afternoon, we postponed our celebration until today.
I've seen so many fun primary 100 day celebrations in the blogging world lately, I knew I wanted to have a similar celebration in my classroom, only geared to my older grades. We have also just started our Classroom Olympics, so I knew I wanted to tie that it. For our Olympics, my students are divided into 5 groups in the classroom (mixed grade 5 and 6 students, genders, and abilities). Each group took on a country name, and gold medals are handed out for various reasons during various points of the day (when I catch them doing something great).
We started our celebration this morning, coming up with a graffiti board of 100 different ways to conserve energy. Each group had to come up with 20 different ways (first group to finish won a gold medal, as well as the group that showed the most team work). From there, each group had to add their 20 ideas to a whole group graffiti poster (each group wrote in a different colour). It was a pretty impressive display when all had finished.
My favourite activity was our writing activity - no original ideas here - it was just a "When I am 100 years old" writing prompt. A few days ago, I took all their pictures and "aged" them with the agingbooth app (well worth the $1.00). I sent them to be developed, and we added them to our writing. We completed the graphic organizer for writing (in our writing right now we're focusing on organization (paragraphs) and adding voice). When students were finished the organizer, they began to publish their work. Only a few students finished up so far, but I can't wait until we're all done. Our very incomplete bulletin board was like a magnet, drawing students in from all over the school. :) I actually had 2 sets of pictures developed, so we could send home a finished writing piece right away, instead of making parents wait until the end of the year when our writing portfolios go home. This is what we have so far.
In the interests of sharing (and maybe prompting me to buy more moisturizer), I'll share mine. I did one up for myself (and have displayed it, too) to lend a little moral support to the ones who were a little apprehensive to share their pics with the class (grade 6 girls ... enough said). And of course, if I had a student who really didn't want to share their pic or their writing, I wouldn't make them. So far, we're all in. :)
If you would like a copy of the graphic organizer we used, I've uploaded a copy to google docs. Click
HERE to download a copy.
We finished our 100 day celebration in math. We have just finished up our measurement unit, and are just about to start into geometry, so I thought I'd treat our class like a diagnostic for our upcoming unit. Each group got a piece of chart paper and a set of markers. I told them that each task was a medal event, and the first team to correctly finish the task would win a gold medal. To celebrate 100 our tasks were:
- draw an angle with a measure of 100 degrees
- draw a circle with a circumference of 100 cm (I was surprised they found this one difficult)
- draw a quadrilateral with a perimeter of 100 cm
- draw a polygon with an area of 100 cm2
- draw a prism with a volume of 100 cm3 (I wasn't surprised they found this one so difficult - no medal winners for this task)
So much fun!!! I KNOW the students had a lot of fun learning today. We stayed on task with our current units of study, awarded a lot of gold medals, and celebrated our learning. This is definitely going to be a tradition I continue in my classroom.
Happy Tuesday!!
Happy Thursday!!!
Happy Hopping! 
Tuesday was our 100th Day Celebration. SO MUCH FUN! I wrote a blog post earlier this week about all our activites (you can view it HERE - you can also grab a copy of the graphic organizer we used for the writing piece), so I'll just share a few pics from our day. We integrated our celebration into science, writing, and math. We came up with 100 ways to conserve energy, aged ourselves and wrote a reflection of our lives at 100, and explored the number 100 through measurement and geometry in math.
We've been taking on close reading in the classroom. It's not something that's required in our school board yet, but I started reading Notice and Note a couple of weeks ago, and I was hooked. It takes the comprehension strategies I already use in the classroom, and just bumps it up a notch. I love the way it ties it all together, and the connections the students were making with their thinking and reading. We've started reading the second book in the Shadow Children series, Among the Imposters, and we've been doing a little close reading with some excerpts from the chapters. My students are LOVING this series! I made a Close Reading Poster set for my students to use during this process. 
We've also been doing some fun word study activities inspired by another great read I picked up, Word Nerds. This book has so many great word study activities you can take right to your classroom. My students are really enjoying these activities. We're focusing on new words and word choice with our close reading, so this has tied in perfectly. For one activity, students had to identify a new word in their reading, define it, and then colour their card with the colour the definition made them think of. On the back of the card they made, they had to explain why they chose that particular colour. For another activity, students had to pick out a character trait in their reading, and then illustrate the actual letters of the word to show the meaning of the word. Some of these word illustrations were fantastic!
Last, but never least, Friday brought Valentine's Day (and a full moon). ;) I was up far too late on Thursday, finishing Valentines for my daughters' classmates. I found these ridiculously cute Valentine's cards on I Heart Nap Time. My own kiddos LOVED them. 
And that brings me to today ... all done the girls' activities for the day, and looking forward to a day spent watching the Olympics. Happy Saturday! I'm linking up to Doodle Bugs Teaching Five For Friday. Grab a coffee and hop on over.
