MADISON – “Whew … we made it!”

Columbia Elementary School students recently breathed a sigh of relief to reach a major milestone for the 2018-2019 school year. On Jan. 22, Columbia celebrated the 100th day of school with various activities in grades K-3.

Kindergarten students dressed up to resemble people who are 100 years old. Girls wore crocheted shawls, lots of lace and horn-rimmed spectacles and combed their hair in ‘up-do’s.’ The boys ‘grew’ gray beards and white hair, used walking canes and wore straw hats and suspenders.

Interns from Bob Jones High School helped the kindergartners with their “100-day snack mix, counting by 10’s to make a snack mix of 100 items,” Columbia third-grade teacher Karen Jump said.

First-graders also dressed like elderly people and “did an investigation to see if it took 100 licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll pop,” Jump said. First-grade classes conducted a kindness project and a 100th-day of school project that corresponds to the Leader in Me initiative at Columbia.

For about two weeks, first-graders collected 100 items per class, including cat chow, dog food and cleaning supplies, to donate to Peace, Love & Animals, a non-profit, no-kill animal rescue organization.

Second-grade classes counted 100 items, such as erasers, buttons, pencils and crayons, and used those items as non-standard units of measurement. In the hall, they lined up the collected items end to end to view the differing measurements.

Columbia third-graders engaged in Secret Agent Day. Some students wore trench coats and most used sunglasses to resemble Secret Service agents. In darkened classrooms, read by flashlight, fingerprinted themselves and used magnifying glasses. They solved multiplication problems using a highlighter and black-light flashlight.

Third-grade teacher Alisha Mayfield said Secret Agent Day was a perfect way to practice the close reading skills of supporting answers by using text evidence. “Students found answers to questions in their text and then checked their answers using top-secret evidence folders where text evidence was marked with invisible ink that could only be seen under a black light,” Mayfield said.