100th Day in 2nd Grade

Hey guys!  It's Angie from Lucky Little Learners and I am coming off of an exhausting, yet super fun, day of school!  Today was our 100th Day of School and I have to admit that there were so many moments throughout the day today that got me excited about the thought of blogging because I kept thinking, "Gosh, they are going to love this!"  Going into today,  I knew that I wanted to write a blog post because the 100th Day of School has always been a favorite of mine and I want to share with you a couple of the successful activities that we do. 

 When my students come into the classroom, our routine is always the same.  They come in, lay out their BEE binder, read the morning message, sharpen their pencils, and begin their morning work.  They knew that today was going to be special when a plastic baggie was on their desk and they were told that their morning work consisted of counting out 100 Legos.  Let the crazy fun begin...yes, right away at 8:10!

 Time out from the Legos...as my students started filling their plastic baggies, several of my students were intrigued by the 100 Adjectives display.  They wanted to know what was going to be happening on this board so after we got settled in, I explained to my students that one of the many challenges that I had for them today was to come up with 100 Adjectives.  When one of my students replied, "When can we start?" I knew we were in for a fun and busy day!

 As you can see they jumped to this challenge.  It was so fun to sit back and watch these guys work together.  Communication was key as they helped each other spell words, check for words that may have been doubled up, and triple check to make sure that the words that were listed were adjectives and not nouns or verbs.

 They conquered the task!  Everything may not be "dictionary spelled" but that was not the focus of this activity.  I think it looks great!

 Now, back to the Legos...once each student had their bag of 100 Legos, I instructed them to create something with their Legos.  I didn't care what it was but I did tell them that they had to use all 100 Legos and they could not trade any of their pieces for different sizes.  As you can see above, I may have some Type A kiddos with the all red and all yellow Legos.  Ha!  Ha!

 This task ended up taking them a lot longer than I had anticipated.  Their creativity kicked into high gear as they found this task to be a little more challenging than anticipated at the beginning.  There was some frustration with creations tipping over so they worked together to come up with the solution that the base had to be bigger and that the creations couldn't be too tall.  I loved watching their minds at work with this!

 Once each student finished their Lego creation, they had to come to me to create a label.  We displayed their creations around the classroom.  One of my students said, "Mrs. Olson, it looks like a Lego museum in here!"  Yes, I will definitely let these take over my classroom for the next week!  Another student suggested that our principal and other classes come and take a tour...I just may have to arrange this to happen.  I love when they are proud of themselves!

 Once their creation and label were on display, I gave them a writing template and asked them to use adjectives to write "beefy sentences" that would describe what they made.  You can get a copy of this Lego writing template HERE.  They modeled their "2nd grade best handwriting" with hopes that Mr. Nagel would come in and read their sentences!

 I have included a few of their writing samples and Lego creations.  They may not be perfect but I feel that it was an effective activity!

Another favorite from today were these photos.  We used the Aging Booth app to create these photos of ourselves as if we were 100 years old.  I have never heard my kids laugh so hard when we went through everybody's picture on the document camera.  (DISCLAIMER:  I got permission to use these photos from each child's family.)

 I definitely think that mine is the SCARIEST LOOKING!  YIKES!

I would like to end this post with our 100 Reasons Why We Love Our School bulletin board display.  We made this last week for our Parent Teacher Conferences but it ties in so nicely for the 100th Day of School.  I hope that you found a couple of ideas that you could use for your 100th Day of School or that you could pin to your 100th Day Pinterest board!