The 100th day of school is fast approaching. It generally falls in early February in Connecticut, though of course that depends on when your school year started and how many snow days you’ve had.
Whenever it happens in your school, here are 10 activities, resources, and suggestions from NEA to help your elementary students get excited about mathematics!
Ten Math Activities
Here are 10 mathematics activities to get you started.
- For homework, have your students collect 100 things and bring them to school for the big day (pennies, paperclips, cheerios, toothpicks, buttons). Have students make a display on a large sheet of paper and write about their collection.
- Get a catalogue or newspaper ad, or have students visit a store website and ask them to spend $100. Who can come closest without going over their $100? Can someone spend exactly a dollar? Older students studying decimals and percents can work with the sales tax.
- How many times can your students jump in 100 seconds? Pair up students and have them record and graph their data. Ask students about their graphs. What does the information tell them? How many jumps in all? Ask another teacher to conduct the same experiment and compare the classes’ data.
- Let A=$1, B=$2, C=$3, and so on. Can students find words that are equal to $100? How close can the students get? What do they notice about the letters in the words that are close to $100 or exactly $100? (Grouper is a $100 word.) What words do they pick to start with, why?
- Ask students: If your great-grandmother is 100 years old, how many days, weeks, hours, seconds, and minutes old is she?
- Have students walk a hundred paces. Mark off, measure the length, and collect the data as a class. Why are some students’ measures more or less than others? Would the measures be the same if we did it again? Why or why not? How could we make it the same?
- Give each group 100 pennies. Ask students: How many pennies would you have in each group if you divided them by 2, 4, 5, 10?
- Is it faster to count to 100 by twos, fives, or tens? Why is it slower or faster?
- Exploring Math With Jellybeans: Four activities in estimation, place value, graphing, and probability for grades 3-12.
- Measure out 100 ml of juice per student. How many ml of juice did the whole class drink? How many liters of juice did we drink?
Children’s Literature
Here are five math-related children’s books for the 100th Day celebration. These books are suitable for children ages 4-8.
- One Hundred Hungry Ants, by Elinor J. Pinczes
- The 100th Day of School, by Angela Shelf Medearis
- One Hundred Is a Family, by Pam Munoz Ryan
- Miss Bindergarten Celebrates the 100th Day of Kindergarten, by Joseph Slate
- 100th Day Worries, by Margery Cuyler
