Our 100 Celebration

Yesterday we celebrated 100 in school! We started homeschooling kindergarten this year using My Father's World curriculum. Technically, we have not completed
100 days of school, but we've filled up our charts so we are celebrating anyway! (100 days of homeschool can take a while to add up depending on your schedule.)

We filled our 100 chart by adding 1 straw to a jar every day (or a couple to speed the process). We bunched them up in 10s as we went. For every straw added we updated our chart. This is a great way to teach numbers. It's so fun to see where your child ends up. Anyway, on to our day!

I prepped several white bags the night before. Each bag has an activity or a treat. We just covered time in our curriculum so the little clocks were perfect for our special day. I got the idea here. Since Sister isn't reading time, I made her bags with the analog time so they could find both bags at each hour. The bags have the same thing in them. I also tried to alternate longer activities with shorter activities so I could squeeze in some curriculum or work in between.

9:00 Build Something with 100 Legos

 

Beemer was pretty excited to open the legos.

Sister was hoping for pink legos. I filled her bag with the more simple blocks.
She has just started playing with Lego Duplo blocks (which I think is really cool).
I wasn't sure how she would do with little legos, but she got right to work!

 

I don't always sit down and play with the kids like I
should so today I tried to focus more on that.

Here they are with their finished products! 

 

  After Legos I put a movie on for them, A Bug's Life.
We are starting Insect this week in school so it seemed fitting. See our ant farm pictures here! 

 10:00 Eat 100 Nerds

Needless to say, there was a lot of excitement on this one.

 

Wonder what's next?

 10:00 Read 100 Pages

I made the mistake on this one of giving them an empty bag.
If I did it again I would put a little book inside the bag with the slip of paper.
Sister was really bummed her bag was empty and Beemer did not want to read books.
I thought they would be really excited about this one!

He did get into it once I introduced Captain Awesome. If you have a superhero
kid this is a nice alternative to the usual books. The superheroes are
elementary school kids. It's a chapter book with drawings on most of the pages.

Truckery Rhymes would be a great boy baby gift, it's old school nursery rhymes written about trucks. We've enjoyed all of the Jon Scieszka books we've read. He was recommended to us by Aunt M, retired kindergarten teacher. You can find the list of her faves that I posted here.

Clifford was for Sister, of course.

1:00 Glue 100 pieces of paper

I got the inspiration from here. They definitely did not glue all 100 pieces,
I should have gone with something more like the link.

Did I mention this was a chance to play some more with my new lens?

 

2:00 Count 100 Pennies

100 Pennies!!

I ran out of pennies at 93 cents. Don't tell Beemer, the other 7 came out of his piggy bank.
Sister got dimes, she wasn't sad there weren't 100 of them.

Put them in your piggy bank!

  

3:00 Make a 100 Cookie!

First, read "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and retellthe story to mommy.
Enjoy your cookie with dinner. I got the idea for the cookie here.

 

 

 

We enjoyed it after dinner, couldn't let daddy miss out!

We took some selfies before our last baggy.
I really don't get in the picture with my kids often enough.

4:00 Measure 100"

After we measured 100, the kids wanted to see how tall they were.
Sister is 38" and Beemer is 45"!

My kids love to measure. They were really excited about this. In fact, I didn't have to read
the paper to Beemer, he guessed what we were going to do based on the measuring tape!

This was a special day. I don't do things like this often. I always want to,
but I never pull it together. I've been home a lot more lately and it has
given me more time to make things a little extra special. More on that later!

Add That to the List

An Ant Farm. Add that to the list of things I never thought I'd have in my house. On purpose.

This is one of those things I could have easily skipped out on. I really was not excited about
spending $20 for this school activity. I am so glad I didn't skip it! Our ants came in the mail
a few days ago and we had them in their habitat right away. Even The Officer got in on the fun!

(P.S. did I mentioned I'm homeschooling this year?)

Poking a hole for the initial tunnel.

 

We're ready for ants!

 

Loading the ants. Not to worry, we cooled them down
in the fridge for a bit first so they weren't too feisty.

The kids enjoyed a couple of them who kept trying to climb back up the tube.

These little guys are fascinating! (Or should I say girls? Most of the worker ants are girls,
and I haven't exactly flipped them over to see what we got!) They have been hard at
work from day 1 building tunnels and hills. There are so many lessons to be learned
from the hard-working ants. I highly recomend this activity.

If you're interested in purchasing an ant farm, I would recommend heading to Hobby Lobby
or Mardel when you have a coupon. I was going to borrow from a friend,
but the cost to re-order ants is almost as much as buying the ant farm/ants the first time.