NEWS

Counting on learning

Teachers come up with creative ways to celebrate 100 days of school

By JOHN HOWELL
Posted 2/15/23

Kindergartner Layla Nappa was one chocolate chip short of filling the 10 squares on the grid in front of her.

“I need one more,” she said looking up at her teacher, Milissa …

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NEWS

Counting on learning

Teachers come up with creative ways to celebrate 100 days of school

Posted

Kindergartner Layla Nappa was one chocolate chip short of filling the 10 squares on the grid in front of her.

“I need one more,” she said looking up at her teacher, Milissa O’Neil. She asked Layla how many she had and without calculating Layla said nine. The next line of squares were to be filled with M&Ms and then came pretzels until all 100 boxes were filled to make the 100 day trail mix that the kids would get to take home.

What the kids didn’t realize was that the trail mix and other projects O’Neil had students working on were part of a STEM – science, technology, English and math – curriculum that was incorporated into celebrating the first 100 days of school on Friday. The trail mix exercise would have students counting by tens and fives as well as figuring out how many items they were short of making 10 or had too many of, meaning they had to give back a few M&Ms. Munching was not permitted.

The challenge of erecting a tower from 100 small plastic cups preoccupied Jeremy Quezada. He moved around the pyramid he was building looking to fit in the cups he had left. “Five,” he said. So, how many had he used?

Jeremy started counting. He hadn’t thought to use subtraction. There was more to the exercise than math, explained O’Neil. She had kids draw how they would build the tower before starting. The drawings were of red (the color of the cups) columns, hardly architectural renderings or building plans, but she had planted the seed of solving a problem before you start building. Legos offered yet another exercise using 100 as did geo blocks. The class was also to write a sentence describing their creations.

“Teaching is just a joy,” said O’Neil who has spent the past five years at Oakland Beach. O’Neil and her assistant, Marie DeLoreto, went along with the 100-year old dress code for the day even though a few of their students out did them with canes, white wigs and wire frame glasses. The neighboring first grade classroom of Katie Myers was similarly dressed and gathered quickly for a class photo before rushing to lunch.

They were given a quick quiz: This being the 100 days of school and there being 180 days in the school year, how many days left until the end of school?

That wasn’t even a challenge for Oakland Beach first graders.

100, schools

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