100th Day Construction Day- Building to 100

We are ready for our day!

Welcome to the 10×10 Construction Company!  Building our way to 100!
We have to start off by saying that much of our inspiration for this room flip (transformation) and all of our room transformations come from Kim Bearden (co-founder of The Ron Clark Academy) and Hope and Wade King (rock-star educators and co-founders of Get Your Teach On).  They have truly inspired us to find ways to make our teaching full of rich and rigorous content and incredibly engaging.  Our kiddos are always so engrossed in their learning during flip days like this.  We teach a transitional kindergarten/ kindergarten combo class, so we are always looking for different ways to celebrate special days.  Since we have some of the same students two years in a row, we don’t want to repeat any celebrations.  We rotate what we do for 100’s day (and other special days) every year so that it isn’t a repeat for any of our students.  The years that we do not do 100th Day Construction Day: Building to 100, we do our 100’s Day Mystery and it is one of the BEST. DAYS. EVER!!  Click HERE to read our blog post all about it! We still have former students talking about it! We knew that we wanted to try and create something as unique and engaging, so Construction Day was born.  Our “construction workers” spent the 100th day of school building to 100!  This could actually be done anytime of the year to reinforce numbers to 100.  We also have created the same Construction Day with activities to 120 if that fits the needs of your students better. Click HERE to check it out.

We started the excitement by sending a note home (the day before) welcoming our students to the 10×10 Construction Crew and requesting them to report to their job site (their classroom) in the morning.  We also sent a Remind (app) text asking parents to please read the notes to their students that night.  Parents told us that their kids were SO excited to come to school the next day to see what they would get to build.Transforming our classroom was super simple.  We sent a Remind text (We love this app!) out to parents a few weeks in advance asking to borrow any construction props they had.  We were amazed at what they brought in – orange cones, construction signs, hard hats, safety vests, and even blueprints!  We set the props we borrowed around the room and outside, put up some construction signs we created, and hung caution tape pretty much everywhere we could. The caution tape was the only thing we bought to transform our room (good ol’ Amazon). We put out a sign-up sheet where parents could volunteer to bring various items for the day such as food items for the counting to 100 snack.  Many of our parents are capable of donating, but we have had classes where that wasn’t the case.  We just changed the centers and made sure that we asked for fewer or no items. We also asked for parent (grandparent, older sibling, …) help to run our “job sites” for the day.  

Awesome parent volunteers “site supervisors” (and a tiny inspector!)

Outside our classroom door

Getting ready to enter the “job site”.

Inside of the classroom, we taped blueprints on some of our walls and cabinets and hung up even more caution tape!  Can you really ever have enough caution tape?  Its a super cheap way to add a huge engagement factor!   We added a few ladders and some scaffolding that we borrowed and bam…we had a construction site!  We also pulled up a YouTube video of a construction site and had it playing.  It was fun to hear the sounds of construction equipment while students were working!

We hung these blueprints up around the classroom.

When the students arrived, they “clocked in” and received their crew badge, “tool belt” (construction apron), and hard hat.  A parent donated the aprons.  Sometimes Home Depot will also donate them.  They are about a $1.00 each.  We bought the plastic construction hats from Amazon (you can buy pretty much anything from Amazon).  We saved the hard hats and aprons to reuse whenever we do a construction theme.  

Showing off her crew badge

This little guy’s mom even made him a special shirt for the day!

Now, our crew members were ready to report to their various “job sites” (stations). Each job site had a “job spec” envelope.  The job spec sheets (directions) were glued to the front. Each job spec sheet listed building supplies needed, crew requirements (how the kiddos worked – in teams, partners, or individually), job details (directions on what to do at the station), and inspection criteria (what the crew needed to do for their job to be considered complete).

Number cards were placed inside each “job spec” envelope.  We made sure to mix the numbers up and get a wide variety of numbers in the envelope. At the end of each “shift” (which lasted 15-20 minutes), and after completing the activity at their job site, the “site supervisor” (volunteer at that station) gave the students a few of the number cards to add to the giant 100s chart we had posted in our classroom. We drew a grid on our whiteboard and hung the cards with tape.  To determine how many numbers to put in each job spec envelope, divide 100 by the number of job sites (stations) you have.  Then, divide the number of number cards by your number of rotations.  That will determine how many number cards to pass out after each job-site completion (at the end of each station).  If a job site required a recording sheet, we kept those in a folder at the job site.