Celebrating 100!

The kids and I had a great time today celebrating our first 100 days of home school.  100 days or 98 days, it didn't matter.  'Shroom and Lolli were just excited to have a day "off" from spelling tests, grammar lessons, and math problem sets.  While I did try to incorporate some learning in the day, somehow the two made it through the day without putting a single pencil to a single sheet of paper.

Some of our "learning tools" of the day involved sugary sweet things -- in the form of gumdrops

(exactly 100 of these paired with exactly 100 toothpicks),

random, loose, tiny objects found around the house (exactly 100 of these items, all of which should fit in a small can, incidentally),

some colored beads (I'll give you one guess as to how many EXACTLY....),

and a huge map of the world so we can list "a few" countries.

In addition to making art with 100 Perler beads (with glue and a pair of tweezers), naming 100 different countries, listing 100 things for which we're thankful, documenting 100 interesting adjectives, we also committed ourselves as a family to participate in at least 100 Xbox Kinect events during this week (we are all sore and tired now).  One of the activities involved a "treasure hunt" of some sort.  They were each given a small can and fifteen minutes to fill the can with exactly 100 items.  They had to find at least ten different items so they couldn't simply fill the can up with Cheerios or paperclips.  Here's what they collected:

Can you tell which stuent collected which menagerie of treasures?

(Yes, how did you know we own the games Othello, Bananagrams and Sumoku?)  Despite providing them with extra time, I was surprised that neither one of them collected exactly 100 items.  'Shroom collected 101 items and Lolli had a collection of 110 items.  We did work in some math when we added a long list of numbers.

The most time consuming part of the day (besides the Xbox challenge which will take the rest of the week), was building a gumdrop structure.  There were two rules to this activity:
1)  use all 100 gumdrops and all 100 toothpicks
2)  all items must be connected

Lolli and 'Shroom had a fifteen minute start into this activity before I had to take Lolli to her weekly piano lesson.  'Shroom was into his structure so I figured he would be fine during the 45 minutes we would be gone.  Air Boss even took a peek at his progress during his lunch break so I figured he was fine.  Well . . . when we returned, 'Shroom was done!  And . . . he didn't heed either of the two rules!  He had built a house and had shoved some people inside (in the form of loose--unattached--gumdrops) and had leftover toothpicks.  Uggh!  I guess I should have written the rules down ('Shroom still struggles with multi-step instructions).

Anyway, we "reworked" his structure to adhere to the rules which make the activity a bit more challenging.  Okay...I confess, I ended up getting way more involved than I should have but I did keep to his original plan of building a house.

Look, we even made an apple tree (a pretty sad-looking one).

Well, all in all, it was a fun day.  The kids wish every day could be a 100th day celebration!

(uhhh...on closer inspection, I think my Perler handiwork does not meet the 100-bead requirement...
yeeesh....now WHO has trouble following directions?!?)