Well, the 100th day of school has came and went. Only 80 more to go!!! On the 100th day of school my first graders took part in a couple of different activities. As part of their homework assignment, the entire first grade team created t-shirts with 100 items on them (stickers, polka dots, legos, coins, band-aids, fingerprints, etc.) The kids were super creative with this assignment and I loved how different everyone's t-shirt was. For morning work, my students had to write 100 words that they knew- they could choose from our Word Wall Words, spelling dictionaries, sight word flip books, and any other basic print from around the classroom. Then we switched gears to work on our informative writing. My first graders were asked to think about what their life will be like when they are 100 years old. After much laughter, the response I got to this activity was amazing. My students are all 6 or 7 years old, so for them to comprehend the idea of being 100 years old, was a lot to ask. This activity had me in tears due to the hysterical responses from my students. "When I am 100 years old, I will be sitting on my couch eating Skittles with my fake teeth." "When I am 100 years old, I will be 'a-tired' (retired) to Florida with my Mimi and Papa, golfing everyday." "When I am 100 years old, I will go to the old people club and play board games with all of my friends." "I will have 18 grandkids and 2 kids, I will visit my kids and their family everyday." "When I am 100, I will go to church everyday because I think that's what my Grampy and his friends do everyday." They were then asked to draw a self-portrait of what they would look like when they are 100 years old. Their final products were hilarious!

After lunch, we switched gears from ELA to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math). Unfortunately, it is very rare that my first graders get much time with science, let alone STEAM. So for this special day, I decided to throw out my typical afternoon plans of reading, and I brought a couple of different 100th day STEAM activities into my classroom. I put my students into teams of 3 and set up the stations (as pictured in this post) around the room. I told my class that they were to work as a team, and using the materials at the stations they had 100 seconds to build anything they could. They really enjoyed the freedom to build without being told what they needed to build. This allowed for creativity and most of all, teamwork. Something that children this age need a lot of practice with. They thoroughly enjoyed rotating throughout all of these stations, and really loved that they only had 100 seconds at each station. After seeing their enthusiasm and their creativity with this activity, I will be making more of a point in the future to incorporate STEAM challenges whenever possible!