It would be possible for teachers/ adults to implement all 5 process standards with this challenge. Children will need to problem solve, reason, and communicate in order to participate in any of the challenges. They will also need to connect their experiences with math and experiences in everyday life, and somehow represent their thinking, either with pictures, models, writing or mathematical symbols.

The first two challenges (What Could I Purchase for $100?) And (Finding Names Worth $1.00)) focuses on number sense, an integral part of the Number and Operations content standard. The third challenge also focuses on the Number and Operations standard, and also encompasses the Patterns, Functions and Algebra standard.

About The 100th Day of School:

The 100th Day of School Celebration*, usually held in late January or early February, is rich with opportunities for developing number sense in the primary and elementary grades. The celebration has generated 100’s of ideas for children to work with large numbers in cross-curricular activities, including literature, science, technology, music, movement, and art. There are opportunities to work with all math content areas, including data and statistics (sorting, tallying, graphing), number (counting, estimating, using operations, place value), measurement (iteration, estimating, using standard and non-standard measuring tools), geometry (making geometric designs with 100 items) and algebra (using 100 items to sort and make patterns.)

The 100th Day of School* is my favorite school celebration because it belongs solely to the community of learners gathered in my classroom. There are no "Hallmark" cards, no "Della Rosa" bulletin boards (at least not yet!) and no other commercial infringements on this day, set aside in many classrooms to mark and celebrate the 100th day of learning together. I would like to pass along a few things I have learned about celebrating this special event with young children.

Don’t Go Overboard!

My first response to the idea of celebrating 100 Day was to go overboard. I had received a handout entitled "100 Ways To Celebrate 100 Day"* and I think I tried to do every one of them! As a result, I was guilty of subjecting my kindergarten students to "sensory overload!" They were as tired after celebrating this day as they were after overblown Halloween and Christmas celebrations! I soon realized that I, like many teachers, had fallen into the trap of having too many good ideas! I have since learned that a more "low key" focused celebration is more valuable to the children and less tiring for me! Choose one or two really important ideas or themes and save the other ideas you may have heard about for another year.

Don’t Think This Holiday Is Just For The Little Ones!
When I left the kindergarten classroom to teach 4th and 5th grade accelerated classes, I thought that I would have the put aside this celebration. No so! I found out that the older learners at school are just as excited about this benchmark day. They have fond memories of their earlier experiences, and it is fun to build upon these memories and add more challenging activities for the "bigger" kids in school. For this reason, I included Barney’s problem, which may be quite challenging. (Don’t let this scare the younger children off. It is possible for them to solve it using strategies such as use manipulatives and "guess and check.")

Involve The Whole School
100 Day Celebrations are even more fun if they are celebrated school wide. Here is a simple way to involve students, teachers and parents. Put a large poster outside your classroom that says, "How many ways can you write 100? Invite students, parents and teachers to think about this and add their own ideas to the poster, which will be quite varied depending on the grade level or mathematical maturity. So far, some of the ideas on my poster include:

With these suggestions in mind, teachers who wish more information about celebrating this even in their classrooms might find the following sources of information helpful:

• Check out the 100th Day of School homepage http://www.siec.k12.in.us/west/proj/100th
  
  This site contains information about internet and classroom activities, and links to other Web sites that will help make the day fun and meaningful for students at every grade level. (Don’t do them all!)

• There are several books on the market concerning the 100th day of school. May I suggest you check your local bookstore for these?

  Miss Bindergarden Celebrates the 100 the Day of Kindergarten by Joseph Slate

  Emily's First 100 Days of School by Rosemary Wells

  100 Day Worries by Margery Cuyler

*The idea for the 100th Day of School celebration has been around for years. Credit for the ideas is usually given to Lynn Tayler, a kindergarten teacher, who introduced the idea to her class in the early 1980’s and shared the idea in the 1981-82 newsletter of the Center for Innovation in Education. (Math Their Way newsletter.)

About The Challenges:

Ways to spend $100

Young children are rather naïve about the actual value of material items. This is a good opportunity to make a connection between the rather abstract concept of 100 with measurement (money.) While the young child’s notions that $100 will buy a house may be charming, I would recommend spending some time talking about the actual cost of things. Have students search through catalogs, look for prices in stores, and encourage conversations with parents about what things cost. Teachers might ask children to bring in pictures of items and then sort these pictures into three piles:

Making up $1.00 words

This is an interesting activity that allows children to practice addition while developing number sense about relative values of letters. Students can see who has the most expensive name and/or least expensive name, as well as who has the name worth exactly $1.00. Students might compare the value of their first, last, or first and last names, and represent these values in graph form.

Learning 100 Spelling Words

This is an opportunity for students to solve a challenging problem. They must use what they know in order to find out what is unknown. This kind of thinking is algebraic in nature. We may have seen such problems in our high school algebra books, and might solve using the formula 8x=28=100 (if we remember the way to figure consecutive unknowns, that is!) However, this problem can also be solved using the strategy "Guess and Check", Make a Model, Use A Chart. I would recommend allowing children to use calculators as a tool when solving this problem, because the thinking involved can be overshadowed by the tedious calculations. By freeing up the children from this paper and pencil computation, they may be better able to concentrate on the patterns and relationships necessary in order to solve the problem.