100 steps

Today was the 100th day of school that the kindergartners had been to! One activity that the students did to celebrate, was to predict what place in the school they would be able to reach in 100 steps. The students brainstormed the different locations they thought might fit this requirement.  The students then tested out their ideas and found that another classroom was 100 steps away from their classroom. In order to count to 100, they counted by ten.  One student would stand at every 10 steps.  When the students came back and discussed this, my mentor teacher asked, "How many students did it take if we had a student stand every 10 steps and we got up to 100 steps?" Many of the students yelled out, "Ten!"  The students are definitely starting to understand multiples of 10 and how they work.  They often count by tens during the calender activity when they are counting how many days they have been in school so far and when they sing the song about counting by tens.  Since the students really seem to grasp this concept, I might start working with them on other patterns of counting you can use. For example, counting by fives or by twos.  This could be modeled when my mentor teacher counts the number of students in the classroom every morning.  Instead of the helper counting each student individually, perhaps, the teacher could have the students grouped, and the helper could count by the number of students in the equally divided groups.