The Peek: 100 DAYS OF SCHOOL

When we drag our sun-kissed faces back to school each August, we and our freckles find the looming180 days of school to be a mind-numbingly enormous number! But time does fly and before we know it, we are more than halfway through the school year. They say this is what happens when you’re having fun…. This past week we found ourselves rejoicing over the much-celebrated occasion of the 100^th day of school!

Nowhere is this merriment more evident than in Kindergarten and First Grade. Some years this monumental pinnacle is celebrated with geriatric attire.

For one day, these grade levels have historically come to school dressed like wizened Centenarians.

Let me tell you, nothing makes me smile broader than seeing a six year old slowly cruising down the hallway with white-powdered hair, a borrowed walker, and a pair of overstretched knee-high stockings. (Knee-highs which for the preceding several hours have been comically accumulating around scrawny first-grade ankles….) It’s fabulous.

(All of these "elderly" photos are borrowed from prior years).

I suspect our teachers may be growing weary of itchy wigs and looking twice their age every February, because to my confessed disappointment, THIS year the festivities did not include hairnets, canes, and marvelously dapper suspenders and bow ties.

Apparently there are other less embarrassing ways to mark the occasion.

Thirty years ago, Laura Numeroff authored the book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, a massively popular circular tale which launched more than ten additional books. This year, our teachers used a similar template to celebrate our young students and the multitude of things they have experienced after attending 100 days of school.

The selected costume for this year’s festivities included ears and whiskers. The children rotated between the kindergarten and first grade teachers who each used a different Numeroff book to launch book-specific activities in their classroom.

Along with the mouse and his cookie, there was a cat with a cupcake, a moose with a muffin, a pig with a pancake, a dog with a donut and finally, a pig having a party. It was a regular zoo. Pun intended.

Long-term substitute teacher Mrs. Newswanger-Freed noted that in all her years of teaching, this was the first time she could say she was “glad to have a classroom full of mice.”

Gotta love the pig tails....

Kindergarten Aide Mrs. Landis noted that she experienced a bit of “liftoff” when walking too quickly in the hallway with her long canine ears.

Mrs. Miller’s classroom was celebrating giving a cat a cupcake and when I stopped by, they were walking around with clipboards playing “I spy.” The cupcake sprinkle toss was soon to occur.

Large dice were being rolled in Mrs. Price’s room as the students colored the corresponding number of pennies, hoping to total 100 cents in their piggy banks.