Days of School

180. Most every student and teacher knows the number of days in the year, and in classrooms throughout our nation Day 1, Day 100, and Day 180 are the most celebrated. It's not uncommon for the number of days to be recorded as a visual reminder of where we've started, how far we've come, and when we've reached our final destination.  In fact, the number of days we've been in school has been integrated into many Math Skills Block programs including the one that is conducted in my classroom. 

This year, my co-teacher and I borrowed this idea from a colleague. On a piece of 8 1/2 by 11 card stock, we made a place value chart of hundreds, tens, and ones. We laminated the paper, hole punched a set of digit cards, attached a metal ring, and placed them on large push pins to the hundreds, tens, and ones. Of course, for our purpose, we only needed a O and 1 on the digit cards in the hundreds place.   

We put the Days of School chart right below our Calendar and right above our Counting Tape. We'll track the days of the school year on our new flip chart, and then we will also add the day to our Counting Tape. You can see that our Counting Tape has been set up below our board into three rows of 60 with space between each row. We keep the Counting Tape, too, because we use colored dots to count by twos, threes, fours, etc... as we add the number of days we've been in school. By the end of third grade, students will be seeing many patterns among the multiples of numbers.  We'll include questions into our Skills Block like, How many days have we been in school?  How many more days until our field trip? How many more days until we celebrate Day 100? How many more days until the last day of school? What day of school will be ten more than 60? How do you know?

Hope you like the idea as much as we did!  Good luck as you embark on this year's 180.