Hooray for the 100th Day!

Although there are no specific lessons in Bridges that address the 100th day of school, it is a big day in kindergarten.

After all, during Number Corner we’ve been counting the days of school every day since the first one! Students have been adding chain links and stickers to ten-frames, figuring out how many more days to the next 10, and problem solving “How many more days until we are halfway to 100?” and “How many more days are there until 100?”

They’ve been using Bridges lessons that incorporate models such as number lines, ten-frames, Hundreds Charts, and manipulatives to aid them in developing number concept. Bridges does a great job providing many opportunities to address counting to 100 by 1s and by 10s, one of our important common core standards (K.CCA.1).

Students are introduced to Crandall the Crab at Number Corner’s February Days in School: One Hundred Days & Counting. And they love playing Counting Around the Circle by Tens!

Over the years I’ve also incorporated literacy, reading several math books including Miss Bindergarten Celebrates the 100 Days of School by Joseph Slate and Emily’s First 100 Days of School by Rosemary Wells. Students make math connections with the characters in these stories. They count along with the characters and make collections of 100 items.

Students on 100th day

This fall my district provided another math book, The 100 Hats of the Cat in the Hat by Tish Rabe. The book is dedicated to our math coach, Stacey Daly, a trainer for the Bridges curriculum and an excellent resource for anything related to Bridges and the math Common Core. Stacey served as an educational consultant to the author. She met with her to talk about how we teach math, sharing models like ten-frames and number lines and giving feedback throughout the writing and editing process.

In the book, the Cat in the Hat visits a first grade classroom to help celebrate the 100th day of school. He uses many different models and math tools to help the children count, multiply, and divide. This is a great one to read aloud and can be modified to meet student needs at different levels. We acted out parts of the story with the Cat in the Hat. The students used a Hundreds Chart to count by 1s and 10s to 100. As an extension, we also skip-counted by 2s and 5s.

Many of the manipulatives were familiar, such as counting craft sticks by 1s, bundling them into groups of 10, and then counting by 10 to 100.

A poster in the story depicts 100 hats on 10 ten-frames. This is a perfect transfer of the ten-frame model as we collect chain links, fill in ten-frames, and count them daily by 1s and 10s.

We’ve used many of our Bridges resources in fun counting activities, including the Pennies & Mats Work Place from September. This activity is timely in that we’re beginning to recognize and count/add coins as we play Unit 4 Work Place games such as Which Coin Will Win?, Race You to 15 Cents, and Money March. Kindergarteners benefit from lots of experiences with playing with pennies, nickels, and dimes.

We’ve also incorporated pattern blocks in our quest to learn about 100. Students used 100 blocks to create designs and pictures. They also used a 100 template to build the number 100 and then counted or added how many of each pattern block they used.

My students were very proud to complete and wear their ten-frame hats. It was meaningful for them to complete their own ten-frames every 10 days and to watch their hats grow as we watched our number line grow during Number Corner.

As this little roundup of our activities shows, Bridges provides kindergartners so many opportunities to incorporate counting to 100 and to develop number sense!