Many might believe that “100 Day” is for primary students only, but my third graders enjoyed celebrating the 100th day in school as well this week.
All year, we have been incorporating various STEM challenges into our curriculum. Once or twice a month, I pose a challenge to my students to try to create a tower using a variety of materials. This team building activity encourages students to work together, create a plan, and test their plan to see if it will succeed. 
At the beginning of the year we used “back-to-school” items, such as pencils, rulers, and paper to create a tower that would hold up an apple. The most popular challenge so far has been the “Spaghetti and Marshmallow” challenge in which teams attempt to create the tallest standing tower that will hold up one marshmallow using only 20 pieces of spaghetti and 3 feet of tape.
However, in celebration of 100 day, I changed it up a bit by having each team use a different set of materials. I prepared a number of buckets each containing several pieces of one item, such as legos, unifix cubes, playing cards, and popsicle sticks.. Students worked in teams to count out 100 of the items (I had students count an equal amount each to help encourage multiplication and division skills into the lesson!). Then I gave them 6 minutes to work together to create a structure using the materials in their bucket. I also required that the structure be created together, rather than each member creating something independently.
After the 6 minutes were up, they recorded a sketch of their structure and reflected on what worked for them and what didn;t. I then had them rotate around the room to another table to begin creating a new structure with a new material for another six minutes. We then repeated the sketching and reflecting with the new creation.
Out of all the STEM activities I have presented to my class this year, this has been, by far, the most engaging! Everyone worked together to achieve success, and they had a lot of fun along the way!
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