S16: Blog 5: 100 Days Smarter

This past Tuesday we celebrated the 100th day of school; and we sure did it in style! I walked into my classroom Tuesday morning and was handed a stack of different activities for the students to do to celebrate.

We started the morning off by coloring paper crowns that proclaimed my students to be “100 Days Smarter!” These crowns were then cut out and stapled to construction paper bands so that my students could wear them all day.

Next, after our reading lesson, we did some additional reading activities that had to do with 100. I modelled how to fluently read a poem called “It’s the 100th Day!” This poem is all about the different items that students could bring in 100 of to share with the class. Some of the items are silly, like dirty socks and cereal bowls. Other items piqued the interest of my students, like donut holes. After I modelled the reading, my students practiced their fluency by both choral and echo reading it with me. I also asked my students what they would bring in 100 of, if they could. Most of my students’ answers had to do with food, like ice cream and cookies. Some answers, though, made my heart proud. One of my most quiet students, who loves to read, said that he would like to bring in 100 books to share with the class.

My favorite activity of the day was the one we did after the poem. My students were given a paper with the word “one hundred” written letter-by-letter in blocks that they could cut out. They then could manipulate these letter blocks to spell out other words. I was so impressed by how many words my students were able to come up with! They even thought of some that I had not been able to see, like “hero.” I was also impressed by how well my students were able to identify that some of the words they were making were not real words and how they didn’t write those words down on their paper. Furthermore, I was pleased to see how my students were able to pick out words that they made that rhymed, like “rude” and “dude” or “round” and “hound.”

This is a version of a word sorting activity. Word sorts are discussed at length by Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, and Johnston (2012) in Words Their Way. They say that “when students sort words they are engaged in the active process of searching, comparing, contrasting, and analyzing.” (Bear et al., 2012) By doing this, my students are actively learning by doing, instead of being passive and maybe not getting as much as they should out of a lesson. My students seemed to really enjoy this activity. I definitely plan to try to find some word sorts of similar nature soon and to try to incorporate them in class on at least a weekly basis.

The last activity that had to do with the 100th day of school was math-related. First, the students filled in the blanks on a 100’s chart. What I found most interesting about this activity was that even though all my students found it easy, that they all went about filling out the chart in different ways. Some were simply going from left to right, 1 to 100. Others were choosing to do the columns, like 17-27-37 etc. It was a good way to illustrate how differently students’ brains can work and the different patterns they can identify. The students also filled out a page of two-digit subtraction problems. The answers to these problems corresponded to paper blocks that were a puzzle my students had to figure out in order to read the message. My students loved math and enjoyed this activity too. It was a good way for me to see, as their teacher, who is still having trouble subtracting. This is especially important because we have a test coming up where students need to be able to subtract 3-digit numbers.

What the 100th day of school has shown me, along with the Literacy Week activities from a few weeks ago, is stunning examples of student engagement. I can see now that it doesn’t have to be a complicated issue, and that there are truly fun things for students to do from which they are also learning. It is my goal to be more aware of this when I’m making plans for the lessons I teach, in all subject areas. I want my students to always feel as excited and happy to be learning as they were on Tuesday.

Addresses FEAPS 1 f and 3 a, b, and g

References

Bear, D., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2012). Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson.

#EDE4942 #FEAPS1F #FEAPS3A #FEAPS3B #FEAPS3G #wordstheirway