Holiday Gratitude

We started our 100 Day Writing Challenge a little earlier this year to give ourselves a bit more time to wrap things up at the end. 

Officially, the event starts tomorrow and ends on May 31, but I gave my students a soft opening by providing them the chance to post from last Wednesday when we introduced the challenge, and I was impressed by the 31 kids who made time to write over the long Presidents Day weekend. It seems like we're going to have a good year.

And as always, I was amused and charmed by some of the content. Today we didn't have school, wrote one student. I'm not sure why we didn't, but I'm happy since I got to sleep late.

Today I thank the presidents for letting every person who goes to school have the day off, wrote another.

At least they are grateful!

Enrichment

After considering all the suggestions that came in from my students for my 100 day challenge, I finally narrowed it to three, with the advice of my homeroom. I had to go with eating carrots every day, because it's so nutty, and the boy who proposed it was so earnest. "You'll have HD vision!" he promised. 

With that decided, my homeroom students pushed for some sort of daily drawing. "We're the Dolphin Team," they pointed out. "Why don't you draw a dolphin every day? They're pretty hard to draw."

I've learned how right they are over the last 22 years of dolphinhood, and so I accepted that challenge. "Should it be the same dolphin over and over, though?" I asked, but they told me it didn't matter.

My final 100 day dare will be to play a game every day. My homeroom and I have bonded on Fridays over Taco or Burrito, Quicktionary, Bananagrams, and Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, and my English classes often have a playful brain break in the middle of a block period, so these kids know my love of games first hand. 

I'm confident that I am going to be a better person on June 8-- how could anyone go wrong with 100 days of carrots, drawing, and games?

Or This

The rest of the suggestions for my 100 Day challenge came in today, and I like to think I kept the kids on their toes by telling them that if they proposed something boring just to get a Jolly Rancher, I would smash the candy and only give them half of the dust. Oh, they laughed until I reached behind my desk and pulled out the gavel someone gave me back in 1996. Then I pulverized a green apple to demonstrate my commitment to their creativity.

In the end, only a few Jolly Ranchers had to suffer for the greater good, and I got some worthwhile ideas. Here are they are:

draw the same thing every day to see if I improve
put a song suggestion box in my classroom and listen to a new song every day 
sing karaoke every day
dance for 10 minutes a day
read 25 pages a day
eat something hot and spicy every day
do something I've never done before every day
crochet every day
cook a new recipe every day
learn a new fun fact every day
bake a french pastry every day

I'm not sure which I'll choose; each proposition promises to be fun, fattening and/or otherwise enriching. I do like my friend Mary's suggestion from yesterday to learn Welsh while eating carrots on my two mile fast walk. 

Why limit myself to just one?

Maybe?

As the 100 Day Writing Challenge kicks off on March 1, I have again asked my students to suggest a 100 day challenge for me, since I write every day already. I'll be gathering ideas through tomorrow, but here are a few of the suggestions I've gotten so far:

10 free throws a day
10 jumping jacks a day
walk 2 fast miles a day
keep a daily gratitude journal
write a poem a day
read a poem a day
make a sketch a day
stretch for 10 minutes a day
watch a baseball game every day
eat carrots every day
learn Welsh
do as many push-ups as I can every day
write part of a novel every day

Any thoughts?