100th Day of School!

Who doesn’t love the 100th Day of School? After several years of dressing up like we were 100, my K-3 team and I decided to switch things up. While I was out shopping this summer I found some pirate stuff on sale. That is when it hit me…a Pirate Celebration would be perfect!

Celebrating the 100th Day of School is always a big deal. It is such a huge milestone in the school year and the perfect reason for a celebration. During the recent years we have had to cut out some of the more fun activities in exchange for more time focusing on curriculum. However, we have stayed strong with our plan to celebrate the 100th day big!

About a month before the big day our K-3 team (we only have one class per grade level) meets to make plans. We often open a Google Doc to collaborate on and decide on around six rotations for our combined 75 kids. We try to vary the rotations with a mix of movement, academics, technology and crafts.

This year we decided on the rotations below. We like to set up the rotations the morning of and have enough parent volunteers to run them for us. That way we can visit with everyone the whole time and make sure everything is running smoothly. We assign each of our students a number 1-6. That way the groups have varying age levels. This type of set up always works well for us.

We always love for our kids to walk away with some sort of keep-sake from the day and provide them the chance to dress up if a bit if they did not come to school that way. I printed off all of the photo props from my pack and put them on bamboo skewers. They made the perfect prop to hold up in a photo booth! Our media specialist took it a step further and found the perfect background for the students to take their picture in front of the green screen. We also had the hats and eye patches included in my pack for my students to make while they were waiting.

While I was preparing for the day and creating the pack I thought about what type of technology I could include in it. I found a few apps that I thought would be a lot of fun and also connected some QR codes to pirate books being read aloud. The app that we had our students get on was 1000 Pirates. It is a free app that lets the user dress up as a pirate. At the station we had the students create a pirate via the app and then print it out and write a story all about their pirate. When they were done, they could scan the QR codes to listen to a pirate story!

We always want to make sure that we hit all of our content areas during a celebration. That always makes it more academically focused : ) We had a station where the students stopped at to work on math story problems. Somehow I missed getting any pictures of this one!

Another staple at our 100th day celebration is always some sort of craft. This can be the most time consuming station, but is always so much fun for our kids. We do not have very much time during our school day to do activities, so this is always a fun chance. We had our students create cute pirate glyphs based on some of their characteristics. They turned out too cute!

On special occasion days, the kids have SO much energy! Therefore, we always have some sort of exercise station. It is always a favorite! My brother helped me to come up with some fun pirate exercises. The kids definitely enjoyed them!

When we were planning for celebrating the 50th day, my students said to me that they would love to play a 50’s BINGO game. It was such a hit that I decided we needed to add one in to our pirate celebration. It was a lot of fun covering the pieces with gold coins!

If you want to do something similar you can find these activities and so much more in my 100th Day Pirate Pack. There are several activities that we did not have time for during our celebration. A brief list of other items included is below. If you would like to check out the whole thing click the picture to be taken to my Teachers pay Teachers store!