In the past few weeks elementary age children around the country celebrated their 100th day of school. For Kindergarten in particular, this is a special celebration-truly a right of passage into their academic career. I spent three days helping my daughter prepare her 100 days “project”, which was to collect and categorize 100 items of her choosing into groups of 10 in a fun and creative way. By the second afternoon we were working on it she wanted to quit, and frankly I didn’t blame her. When I probed to understand why she didn’t want to complete her assignment she said “mommy, I knew how to count to 100 in preschool-this is boring”; and by the third and final night I was pulling teeth to get her to finish as she argued “I’m not finishing this-I don’t even care if I present it”. There I was, standing at the dinner table arguing with my “eager to please” and hard-working six year old for the first time about schoolwork. My heart should have sank, but actually I totally understood, agreed and sided with her in my mind and heart. {she doesn’t know that and I still made her finish it}. As I spoke to my friends about the 100 days project I found out they too had a similar experience with the 100 Days project, and that’s when it really started to stir up some questions for me… 

100 Days projects as I have experienced them are very surface level learning and I think only continue to be celebrated because it’s what’s always been done. I’m fully in support of celebrating milestones for children, especially in kinder, but I know those six year olds have learned more in 100 days than how to count, cut and glue. So if we are going to continue this tradition the question is how can we go deeper with the 100 days projects?

• What would it look like for us to think about the 100 days project as a reflection of all the ways students have grown, as a learner? perhaps students divide up the number 100 and each child lists the ways in which they have grown since the 1st day of school in some sort of public (collage-like) display at the school.  Maybe you have some fun with this and think about the physical ways in which students have grown and do some math-figure out in inches how much the entire class has grown.
• What about a theme for the 100 days celebrations that requires students to reflect on all the things they have learned?:  “100 days of grit” , “100 days of being mathematicians”, “100 ways we have been an academic community”, “100 books we have read and loved”
• Get those critical thinking skills into gear-introduce those Kinders to the habit of mind “supposition” and have some fun with Back to the Future: what do you suppose you will be like/have learned 100 days from now? 10 years from now? what will the world be like in 100 years?

I’ve never been an early elementary teacher and have the utmost respect for them and what they do for our children. My questioning isn’t a knock on them in any way, it is rather a series of questions to push us collectively to think about carrying on traditions that don’t serve a purpose to/for deeper learning. And if we are going to uphold these traditions, it’s a call to rethink them to ensure that we are celebrating ALL that our children do know and engaging them early in school.