The preschool students celebrated the event by making strings of bird food to make sure the birds had some good food during the colder winter months.

The students used their fine motor skills to thread Cheerios cereal onto pieces of string. Then we tied the two ends of the string together to make a loop like a bracelet or necklace. We took our bird food strings outside to hang them in trees outside the classroom.

We poured about 1/4 cup of lemon juice in a plastic cup. Then we add a little salt to the juice. We added about 20 pennies to the juice. We rubbed about an inch of the nail starting with the pointy end with steel wool. Then we stood the nail up with the pointy end down in the juice. We let it sit for about an hour but it didn’t take a full hour for the experiment to work. The end of the nail down in the juice started looking like copper, like the pennies.

Here is why the nail became copper plated: (according to the Quirky Momma blog site referenced above) The copper from the pennies dissolves a bit in the lemon juice, which produces copper ions.  When you put your nail into the lemon juice (acid), the copper ions are attracted to the iron in the nail and build up over the hour, layer by layer. 

Then cut a slit in the top third section of a sheet of black or brown construction paper. The student can slip his groundhog picture through the slit and pretend that the groundhog is peeking up through his hole in the ground to look for his shadow on February 2.

Watch this live broadcast of the Groundhog Day celebration in Pennsylvania.

Then the students put the puppet together like a puzzle.

We put the box on the other side of our half wall with the string hanging over on our side of the wall. The students worked and pulled until the box came up to the top of the wall for them to reach it.

The students have plastic play tools for play time, but they actually got to experience real tools. With teacher supervision, they did very well and enjoyed using a real hammer and nails.

Ever since the first day of school back in the fall, we have been counting the days. We made a number counting chart with 10 numbers across the poster. The numbers are colored coded. The tens column is yellow. The fives column is pink. All the twos are blue and each number after a two makes an ABAB pattern.

While counting the days of school everyday, the students have learned how to count by tens and fives. They have also learned patterning.

We made a big celebration of the special 100th day. The students made 100 day headbands. They counted 100 rocks. They jumped 100 times. They tried to do 100 jumping jacks. They learned 100 in Spanish (cien). 

The big project for today was for each student to do a 100 day project or poster. They were to bring a project from home with 100 things on it. We had posters with 100 stickers, 100 googly eyes, 100 macaroni noodles, 100 beads, and many more very creative projects.

They used a graham cracker for the base and stacked three marshmellows up like a snowman. We used mini marshmellows so it was not too big of a snack.

We put the snack in the microwave for 10-15 seconds just till the marshmellows got soft and started to flatten.

This was a great activity for forcing the students to slow down and take their time at tracing on the lines and cutting with scissors on the lines. Many of them get in way too big of a hurry and do not do their best work. These tracing and cutting activities make them think about the task.

We hid Mardi Gras doubloons in the sand table. We used those coins because they were big. The students scooped the sand and coins into pans and sifted out the sand until the coins were only left in the pans.