The Hundredth Day

Note: Visit my education blog, The Green Cup.

Today is the 100th day of school for our students.

I suppose the best description of today's activities would be to call it a math literacy activity. We make a big deal out of the 100th day for a couple of reasons.

• It helps develop a sense of elapsed time for our students. Measurement is a math concept and measuring time is among the hardest measurement tasks for elementary school students to grasp
  
  
• It helps teach place value. We've spent the year so far making a big deal out of every tenth day. Now we've made it to the 100th day, and that adds a place value column to the number of days we've had.
  
  
• It helps create an awareness of numbers and of their relevance to everyday life.
  
  
• It helps create enthusiasm for math.

One of the things we do to help students get excited about place value concepts and the 100th day is that we have a visitor every 10th day. Zero the Hero comes to see our kids. Zero arrive at lunch time and usually gets a round of applause from the kids. The kids sing a song they've learned about Zero and Zero passes out cheerios (shaped like a zero) to the kids.

By the third or fourth week of schools kids are walking around talking about how many days it is until zero comes back...

Today we hope to do a video interview with Zero that we can put on the school website.