100's club

Birthday pictures will have to wait until tomorrow. We are exhausted (bouncing will do that to you) and have another day of fun tomorrow. Lou is lucky to have his birthday on memorial day weekend- it makes for a whole weekend of celebration and fun. Some of us will need a sugar detox.

Here's a math activity we are working on this summer. It's called 100's club. I first starting doing 100's club when I student taught 2nd grade. At first, I thought it was just busy work and a time waster. Don't be deceived by the seemingly simpleness of 100's club though. I have since decided that there are many teachable moments and useful features to this simple activity. Like most things this summer, I am adapting it to a (brand new) 3 year old, a going to be Kindergartner, first grader and third grader.

Here is what it is: a blank hundreds chart

Here's how it works. Kids fill in the numbers on the blank 100's chart.

Kids: oddly love it, they love to count to 100, flip it over and keep going. Can they get to the 1000 club? It can be fun and slightly competitive if you have a whole room of kids working on it.

Here's how I use it:
Young math students can learn very basic skills. Here are the numbers 1-10, lets practice those. See what I wrote, lets copy those. Lets count the dots to count to 10. Basic basic. (I held his hand as we wrote the numbers, then he wrote some things on his own. Mostly an H, a N and L). Starts the thinking of counting and working left to right.

Next step up: Lets work on writing 1-20 or 1-30. Lets look for patterns. When you get to 10 that should be the end of the row. Did you forget any when you get to the end of the row? It's like a little self check. See how the whole second row starts with a 1 and then the number. Intro to ones and tens. See how the third row all start with 2. Look at the columns. See how all the 4's are lined up? 4, 14, 24. I plugged in some numbers for additional self check. Again, there is also the element of working left to right and then starting at the left of a new row.

step up: Lets count 1-50. Are things lined up right? Are we getting the 10's all in the last box of each row? (we didn't today!) Let's look at this and count by 10s, 5, 2s. Let's look at odd numbers, even numbers. See the patterns. Lets get this 1-50 down, then we go on to 100.

The advanced version: She's off and running. She wrote her numbers quickly. We could use this to work on multiples. Lets color the multiples of 4, etc. Next time, she flipping her page over to start at 101 and keep counting. This is where lots of my students have had trouble in the past. They can go to 100, but getting over that hump, 101, 102, and seeing how the pattern continues in the other hundreds. There is the element of self check too, how far will they go go once they make a mistake before they catch it. Lets talk about ones, tens, and hundreds. There are lots of patterns to spy out too.

So, that's how is all works. Simple, but with lots of teachable parts and possibilities for spring board activities. -The reason my pages say M&M 100's club is because the old team I used to teach on was called the M&M team. We all had silly names. Anyway, the kids got such a kick out of 'personalized' pages.