101st Day of School

What a busy week we've had! After Valentine's Day, we started preparing for our 101st Day of School. We wanted to do something different for our first graders this year since they celebrate the 100th day in Kindergarten. We wanted to get the students excited about learning, kinda of re-ignite the fire they once had. We've had a lot of testing lately and thought these ideas would work to get them in the spirit again!! 

We decided to have three different rotations. One teacher did Reading Stations, I did Math Stations, and another teacher had writing.

In the math room, we had three stations: Fast Math Facts, Frisbee Toss, and Estimation Station! In Fast Math Facts, a parent volunteer showed the students a math problem. When the students were ready to solve, they tossed a ping pong ball into the correct bin. 

The Frisbee Toss game was SO EASY! My husband made a stand out of foam board. 

 I went through my math flash cards that I already had and pulled out addition and subtraction problems with the answers of 10, 15 and 20. I set it up in the hallway so the frisbees wouldn't be an issue for the other games :)

My kids LOVED this game! 

Last, we had Estimation Station. This was SO easy to prep and the kids LOVED it. I'm going to use it again next week with different items! 

For reading, we also had three stations. We put the kiddos into groups of three before rotating! 

At the first station, the kids played "Toss A Digraph". The ping pong balls were labeled with ch/th/wh and ph words. They had to read the word and toss into the correct bin. 

Who knew reading could be SO much fun!! *wink, wink*

Next, the kids moved over to "Toss a Sight Word". The same concept, except just sight words on the balls and one bin to toss it into. For some reason, I guess all of the excitement, I didn't get very many pictures of this game :(

Next, the kids moved to the Build a Tower Station. This idea from the fabulous Cara @ The First Grade Parade. We jut modified it a bit because every station had to have a specific SOL or standard tied to it. All I did was add sight words to the towers. We also had students who built sentence towers. The kiddos loved doing this activity. 

You can get all of the signs and game cards for the activities shown by clicking here!!

For writing, my next door neighbor used Deanna Jump's 100th Day writing project.

This was so.much.fun. The kids were so excited about WRITING which is so hard to do with firsts. 

All and all, it was such a great day! Our students were engaged and learning at the same time!! 

Here's a few goofy pictures of some of my team members and I!! Love them!