100th Day of School

Children everywhere (well, these parts of the world) are celebrating the 100th day of school on February 9th.

I think its a great idea to recognize how far the kids have come along in learning and achieving goals.

We never had such days when I was growing up. The most significant part of the school year were the first day of school and the final day of school.

Jeffrey's kindergarten class is doing a project to bring in 100 things that the kids can count and show off for the 100th day.

Raven's class did the same thing last year and I didn't get to see what all the other kids brought in. Raven beaded a 100 bead necklace of different colors with the tenth bead a certain color to signify 'tens' to make it easier to count.

I wanted to do something different for Jeffrey, but running out of ideas. I thought of doing a poster board and showing off 100 things he has learned since starting school. Like the 26 letters of the alphabet, the colors, shapes, etc. But that might be too time consuming for a 5 year old to do. So, I might resort to him pasting 100 pieces of macaroni or millions of little things we have around the house to some kind of shape. Or maybe we could do a 100 piece marshmallow pyramid .... maybe 100 strands of dog hair that our smelly dog sheds, ewwww (maybe not).

Around this time of the year, when I was growing up, we'd be busily coloring away printed out Valentines every chance we got. We'd put our carefully colored pieces of paper shaped beautifully and cut with care, into Valentine's Day boxes all the classes from Kindergarten through 8th Grade had displayed in their classrooms.

During class time or around recess, kids would march in with a handful of their handicrafts to drop off to the classroom box. We'd try to guess who the Valentines would be for depending on the person. And back then, we'd be so honest, well at least me, and put 'To So and So---From Ella" instead of leaving out the "from" part.

On the big day, our teacher would open up the box and pass out every valentine -- all of us sitting at our desks hoping we got the most valentines and the girls oooh-ing and aaah-ing on the beautifully colored valentines.

What I remember most of all those years is Ms Smith in 7th and 8th grade doing mini Valentine cakes with our names on them. I loved those! Happy 100th Day and Happy Valentines Day Ms Smith - where ever you are ....