Celebrating 100 Days

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!!