I have been doing this activity for the past three years as part of my 100th day celebration and it has been a huge success! About two weeks before the 100th day of school I pose a challenge to my class. We will try to collect 100 cans of food for the local food pantry. We discuss the importance of helping the food pantry and the kids get very excited to help. As the students bring in their canned goods, we count them. To reinforce the place-value concept, we put groups of 10 in a shopping bag so that we can count them by 10s in the future. We then place 10 bags in a box. Single cans are counted by 1s of course. This provides a second dose of place value practice each day which is always a good thing! We also write the number on the board. If you were doing this with older children, you could even have them complete the subtraction problem each day to see how many cans were brought in that day.
After we have many cans, we talk about how the food pantry will need to sort all the items so that they will be able to find what they are looking for. We then practice sorting the cans into food groups. This gives us a realistic application for sorting and I love realistic applications!!!!
On the 100th day of school, we do a final count of the cans and then bag them up for my husband and I to drop off at the food pantry. The volunteers there always tell me how grateful they are as after the holidays most people forget about the food pantry and they are running low come February.
I love this activity as it teaches so many great mathematical concepts as well as important social concepts. The children are always so excited to help others. There has never been a year that we have not surpassed the goal of 100 cans. Last year we had 148!!! I also love the fact that this project supports a local charity. We donate to Manna on Main Street in Lansdale, PA each year. I highly suggest finding your local food pantry and consider doing this project with your class.
http://mannaonmain.org/
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