Celebrate the 100th Day of the Year with Me

Every year, the teenagers and I volunteer with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis' 100 Days of School celebration. Area schools bring their kindergartners and first graders to the museum, and in between visiting the exhibits, the volunteers help the kids do fun activities relating to the number 100.

This year, my teenager and I had hoped to be assigned to the 100-bean maraca station again, but I actually loved the station we ended up at even more!

When kids came to our station, we helped them measure their height and their arm span, and helped them record the information in inches and centimeters:

If the kids had a little extra time because they were waiting on a few kids to finish up, I'd sometimes also have them stand on their tiptoes and then measure their height so we could compare how much taller they were on tiptoes (usually something like three inches!), or we'd see how long they could step or how high they could reach, etc. There's a lot you can do with a horizontal ruler and a vertical ruler!

It's always fun to me to see the range of kids we encounter, and the differences and similarities--we run through something like 250 kids in two hours, so those differences and similarities are really noticeable! Most of the kids, for instance, were around 143-147 centimeters tall, and their arm spans were always a little shorter. BUT they were all wearing shoes, so I told them that if they hadn't been, their arm span would be the same as their height! It was especially fun for kids to measure themselves against the horizontal ruler and then step back to visualize their arm span, so now I'm on a whole kick about how early ed classrooms ought to have those rulers set out the same way that most of them probably have height charts, so kids can visualize lengths in two planes. 

Many of the kids could not write numbers bigger than 100, but many could, and nearly all could write the numbers below 100. Several kids did a cute thing in which if I said, for instance, that they were 145 centimeters tall, they would write "100 45" on the line. I'd then show them what it looked like to combine it into 145, but I thought their solution was so clever, especially coming from different kids from different schools!

The 100th Day of School wasn't a thing when Matt or I were in school, so it wasn't on my radar when the kids were little enough to have fun with it, and I'm actually really sad about that, because we LOVED random little holidays and celebrations like that, and it would have been as super cute as our yearly celebration of Pi Day and everyone's half birthdays and May the Fourth. The celebration is a fun excuse for kids not just to practice the one-to-one correspondence of counting and the fine-motor skills of writing the numbers, but also to build context and meaning for the concept of 100, and explore the way that larger numbers work.

It turns out that this year, the 100th day of the year is Monday, April 10, which is quite a respectable homeschool day to celebrate a holiday! Here are some activities that I think would be fun--and educational!--to do with younger kids to celebrate the 100th day of the year:

paper chain. We made SO MANY paper chains when the kids were younger! Syd, especially was all in on paper chains, and we used them a lot to count down to various big events. Here's the paper chain birthday countdown that we made in anticipation of her fourth birthday, including the discovery that tearing a link off of a paper chain? OMG, such horror. Such despair.

That's why I actually think a paper chain counting UP to the 100th day of the year would be so great. Every day you don't tear a link off--you ADD one!!! Much less distressing to those tender, tiny hearts. 

For bonus points, make these laminated index cards with the numbers and number words on them for kids to match, trace, and add to their collection each day.

hundred grid fraction art. This reminds me a little of the mathematical map coloring that the kids loved just a few years ago! Kids color a pixel design onto a hundred grid, then can play with rearranging the colors and recording the fractional or decimal representation of each color.

roll to a hundred (or roll to zero). This is a fast-paced game that both of my kids loved long after they'd mastered their numbers, addition, and subtraction to 100. And it incorporates coloring, which is ALSO super fun (and utilizes those fine-motor skills, ahem):

This would make a fun "party game" for the hundredth day of the year, and you could even possibly convince a kid to fill out a blank 100 grid in preparation.

build with 100 things. This works well if you've got sets of more than 100 of various building toys, like LEGOs or blocks, but it would also probably be even more fun and creative if you chose seemingly random things. Can you build something or create a design using 100 pennies? Can you build a structure using 100 books? Who can build the biggest pyramid out of 100 rocks? Tiny little things in bulk also make fabulous math manipulatives, so it wouldn't be a terrible idea to splash out and buy your kid a 100-set of something small and cute as a 100th Day of the Year gift.

write a googol. That time that we read a book about googols, and then I asked each of my small children to write one, turned into a bit of a wacky adventure.

I scrolled Pinterest to look at other ideas, and while a lot of projects made me cringe or looked super corny, there was also tons of non-cringe, non-corny ideas to build a kid's numeracy and inspire them to love larger numbers and help them feel festive and celebratory. Many of the printables displayed would also work well for us homeschoolers to celebrate the 100th day of the year. I know that *I*, for one, will be coloring and wearing a giant cardboard 100-shaped hat on April 10!

The Second to Last Time That I Ever Rode the Carousel

The last time the kids and I hung out at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, we volunteered at one of our favorite stations, Build Your Own Carousel Animal:

My coworker is going significantly off-book here, tempting fate that she will not soon have a cluster of first-graders around our table clamoring to stack paper straws instead of building their nice carousel animals. 

We had big afternoon plans of driving up to the only dance supply store in driving distance that sells the specific make and model of pointe shoes that my teenager prefers, then hitting up Trader Joe's on the way home for their many delicious seasonal products (ah, the varied joys of visiting the Big City!), but first, we loitered around our favorite exhibits, seeing the dinosaurs and moseying through Greece and mooning over the hockey gear--

The Indy Fuel is our nearest minor league hockey team. We went to a game last year and it was an absolute circus; I LOVED IT!

--and, of course, riding the carousel one thousand times. Y'all know how obsessed I am with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis carousel and its bloody, bloody history (seriously, though, read this book! It's bonkers!), and on this particular day I beelined, as usual, for one of the notorious stags, then got Syd to take my picture with it:

Will loves the carousel more than anyone--

--and when she finally got off after a number of rides that I did not even count, I said to her, "Hey, this was the last time you'll ride the carousel for who knows how long!" Because, you know, she was off to college in January, and we don't usually volunteer at the museum over the summer break. 

The kids think that I am cheezy as hell whenever I say crap like that, but I'm glad that I called her attention to that last precious moment and made us acknowledge it, cheezy or not. Because that was the last time that She Who Loves That Carousel the Most will ever ride that carousel:

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You don't usually know when it's the last time that you're going to do something that you love, or the last time that you'll experience some particular precious thing. It's a gift to be able to acknowledge it and say goodbye, even if you didn't know at the time that it would be goodbye forever.

Syd and I actually happen to be volunteering at the Children's Museum again before this change takes place. I usually just ride the carousel once to Will's dozen, but this time I might have to take a page out of her book and ride multiple times. The giraffe! The antelopes! The black horse AND the appaloosa! 

And, of COURSE, my precious, notorious stag.

The Mummy, the Carousel, and the Dinosaur Eggs: I Took a VERY Deep Dive into the History of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis

2008

 I've started to get really interested in really deep dives into really specific topics. Disassociating by immersing oneself into a research project is such a pleasant feeling!

The history of the Children's Museum of Indianapolis is one of my recent small obsessions. It's long been a special place for me and the kids, and it's been interesting to see how some of my favorite parts of the museum, such as its deep respect for children and its integration into the neighborhood in which it's placed, has manifested over the course of its existence. 

I found this 1982 museum-published history in my local university's library (along with some old speeches, guides to extinct galleries, and other interesting documents that I checked out and pored over), and I was riveted by the attention to small, vivid details that it brought to enliven what could have been an extremely dry museum history:

Most of the kids' favorite parts of the museum, such as their holiday celebration and dinosaur exhibit, are too recent to be in the book, but some, such as that carousel we ride every time we visit and the mummy we used to pay our respects to before Chicago took it back, are just as old.

2011

The story of the carousel is particularly interesting, and is a good example of the vivid details that I love most, the ones that would be completely lost to history without the work of journalists, anthropologists, and other historians who take an interest in first-person storytelling. The Broad Ripple Carousel dates to 1917, and operated in a local park until 1956, when the roof finally collapsed and destroyed it. By that time, the animals had been falling apart for a while, as well, getting no more than hasty, non-professional repairs. 

In 1965, the current director of the Children's Museum, Mildred Compton, tried to track down where these worn, broken, beloved 50-year-old carousel animals might have gotten to. This was back in the days when telephone tag apparently hadn't even been invented yet, because each check-in required her to take a physical trip to the physical office of the city's Parks and Recreation department. And because it's local government, mostly nobody had any idea what she was talking about. They'd sort of promise to look into it, but then whenever she'd check back in to pester whomever she'd wheedled that sort-of promise from, she'd find out that they'd left the department, someone new was in charge, and she had to ask them all over again, hear again that they had no idea what she was talking about, and again wheedle a new promise out of them to check into it.

2015

Eventually, Compton got the Parks and Recreation department to reckon that maybe they did have a few of the carousel animals in storage, and okay, fine, she could borrow two of them. They gave her two horses in godawful condition, and she got a local acquaintance to refinish them. He could do the sanding and oiling and repainting work okay, but he couldn't replace the tails, which had been real horse tails.

Did you know that as recently as the late 1960s there was a literal slaughterhouse in DOWNTOWN INDIANAPOLIS?!? And... it apparently regularly slaughtered horses, so much so that when Compton went down there to ask if she could maybe have a horsetail or two, they just showed her into a room where there lay a huge, bloody pile of horsetails??? She rifled through the pile until she found some that she thought might match the horses, then soaked and cleaned them herself in her own home.

2015

A few years passed, then in 1969, thanks to some excellent networking, Compton scored a promise from the Parks and Recreation department that the Children's Museum could have ALL of their carousel animals. Compton and a coworker went to the storage building to collect them, but the animals were in such terrible shape that they essentially ended up crawling around on the floor, trying to snag all the little broken-off pieces of body parts that were strewn around from over a decade of neglect. Even on the intact parts of the animals, the wood was split and warped, and the museum spent years sending the animals out a couple a time to professional restoration artists in Cincinnati. 

The original idea had been just to display the animals, because even though it was a children's museum, most of the museum exhibits weren't interactive yet, or really even hands-on. But then Compton went to a carousel convention (lol!), and the carousel enthusiasts convinced her that what she really ought to do is buy a vintage carousel mechanism and turn her restoration into a living, working carousel again.

2020

Which would be so cool! Except, the museum didn't have the complete set of original animals from that Broad Ripple carousel. There were supposed to be three leaping stags in among all the other prancing animals, but they hadn't been in that storage building. When Compton checked in about it, a staffer told her flat out that they had disintegrated, but that felt... suspicious.

So the museum literally got the local newspaper to run a column asking for the public's help to provide any information about these long-missing stags. And one day, an anonymous informant called the museum. He was all, "The Parks and Rec department has your stags. Go to this year's Christmas show and see."

2022

And wouldn't you know it, but when the Parks and Rec department put on the 1973 Christmas show, guess who was on the float pulling Santa's sleigh?

Three. Wooden. Stags.

Compton marched herself back to the Parks and Recreation department and gave them a lecture entitled "Did you NOT tell me that I could have ALL the carousel animals?"

2010, with a broken leg, riding a stag

And that's how the museum came to have a working 1917 carousel, stags and all, on the top floor! Fortunately, the carousel idea came around as the museum was working on plans to demolish the historic house they'd been operating out of and build a brand-new museum building in its place. The plans had to be altered to allow for the size and weight of the carousel, and it's on the top floor of the museum because that's the only place they could make those adjustments without having to pretty much start over from scratch.

2019, just having come from the temporary exhibit of Greek antiquities, riding a stag

I think the museum's emphasis on dinosaurs must have gotten started in the early 1970s, when that magical Mildred Compton convinced the owner of some of the first dinosaur eggs ever discovered, found in the Gobi Desert from 1922-1923. The donor was the widow of Roy Chapman Andrews, the expedition leader of the group that discovered the eggs. Others of these eggs are at the American Museum of Natural History, and I'm not totally sure how he got some in his personal possession? I've actually got the book he wrote about this expedition, as well as some other books about him, on hold for me at the local university library, so I'm sure I'll know soon!

2010, taking the skin off a model T-rex so we can see its guts

Another long-time museum artifact that the kids don't remember--but I do!!!--is Wenuhotep, the mummy that the Children's Museum had on display from 1959 until the Art Institute of Chicago demanded it back in 2007. I remember there being some hard feelings about that return, because the museum had actually been permanently given the mummy by the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and they didn't know that the institute had only, itself, been borrowing that mummy from the Art Institute and therefore didn't have permission to give it away?!? So it was bittersweet to be reading about that titular mummy in this Children's Museum history, seeing how they built it a special exhibit when they remodeled and had it X-rayed so they could offer a more nuanced depiction of it to their visitors.

2011, during a homeschool class about Ancient Egypt

The kids and I did see Wenuhotep on exhibit a few years later at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it looks like in 2014 they did do some interesting studies of it, but it's been off exhibit there for quite a while. 

2013, in the Ancient Egypt exhibit (there's now a model mummy that kids can interact with)

It sure as heck wouldn't be off exhibit at the Children's Museum, is all I'm saying...

As happens with all the best deep dives, I now have a huge stack of books on adjacent topics to deep dive into--the Gobi Desert dinosaur finds! The ethics of displaying mummies in museums!--and a list of exceedingly tedious questions to ask the next time the kids and I volunteer at the museum--"Say, you wouldn't happen to have that 1920s model of the scene from Goldilocks and the Three Bears that your first museum curator made out of trash because the museum had so few exhibits handy for me to look at, would you? Um, and maybe can I also see the original museum logo, the giant wooden seahorse, that Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s dad commissioned? And maybe that arrowhead that was plucked from the corpse of a pioneer child, too?"

Here's to continuing to hide from all of my problems snugged up safely in the womb of academe!

Back to the Children's Museum, 25 Months Later

Here the kids and I are at Kindergarten Day in March 2020:

And here's the next time that we stepped back into our favorite museum: Kindergarten Day, April 2022!

I've missed volunteering at the museum so much! And even better that it was a Kindergarten Day that finally brought us back, because Kindergarten Day is the MOST fun to volunteer for. It's even more fun than Chemistry Day, because even though the Chemistry Day activity is usually more interesting, it also usually results in us getting lemon juice or maple syrup or something horrifying all over ourselves. Space Day is also really fun, but Kindergarten Day is something special. The little kids are always absolutely enchanted by our simple activities, enthusiastic and easy to work with, and this year's kids were even more thrilled because, thanks to the pandemic hitting when they were all three or four years old, many of them had never been on a field trip before. Like, ever. 

Can you remember your very first field trip? I can. I was also in kindergarten, and my class went to the Arklahoma State Fair to see the animal barns. In the chicken barn there was a chick pen, and in the chick pen was a little ferris wheel in constant slow motion. There was chick feed in each seat, so the chicks would walk themselves in and start pecking away, oblivious to the ferris wheel carrying them up and around.

It remains in the Top Ten Best Things I've Ever Seen.

At one point during this Kindergarten Day, the kids and I were busily making little carousel animal models with the kindergartners. They could choose a cardstock animal in a few different colors and write their name on the back, then decorate their animal as they wished. Next, we demonstrated to each kid how to tear off a piece of Scotch tape, and each kid got to choose a paper straw and tape their animal to it, using tape they'd torn off all by themselves. Finally, they got a paper cone with the tip cut off, decorated it, as well, and inserted the straw into the hole to stand up their carousel animal. If they didn't run off immediately, we'd play carousel animals for a while, using our important directional words of "up," "down," and "around" while acting it out with the kids. 

So I was busily doing this with about three little kids, and one of them said, "Why are we making carousel horses, anyway?"

I said, "Because here in the Children's Museum, we have a real carousel."

The kids were all "WHAT?!?" with big eyes, so I said, "Look over there," and pointed into the adjacent gallery, where the big carousel was going, music blaring, kids riding all the animals, looking like a literal kindergartner's dream come true.

I'm not in charge of anyone's memories, but I sure hope that there are three or so little kids in particular who will carry with them the memory of their very first field trip, when they got to make a little carousel animal to play with and then they turned around and there was a real, live carousel right behind them.

I think my own kids had fun, too. Here's Syd's carousel horse on a cone that a kindergartner decorated for her:

An adult who was chaperoning kindergartners pointed at this horse and asked Syd if she'd made it. Syd said yes, and the adult was all, "Oh. Are you left-handed?"

It was so random, so inexplicable, and yet so clearly meant as an insult that it's pretty much the most hilarious thing that I've ever seen happen. We obviously carefully saved Left-Handed Horse and brought her home, and now she holds a place of honor in our home, as does Will's Asgardian Steed:

Nobody said a peep about the craftsmanship of Will's horse, nor seemed to notice that it has eight legs.

Afterwards, the kids and I had a brand-new gallery to visit. Since our last trip to the museum, Dinosphere had closed for a year, been revamped with new fossils, and had just opened back up a few weeks ago.

Not gonna lie, I was a little nervous about the Dinosphere revamp. A few years ago, the museum did the same thing to ScienceWorks, and they took out the construction site where you could move real-looking rubber rocks (something like these, but even better) around while riding in pedal-operated bulldozers AND the crawl-through earthworm tunnel system. The giant water table with a lock-and-dam setup and an Archimedes screw that they put in is pretty cool, but nothing else compares to the cool factor of a literal bulldozer you can ride in and operate yourself, and literal rubber rocks that you can pile up and toss around and shovel.

Thank goodness Dinosphere is even more epic after its remodel.

There's new signage--

--and they moved Supercroc to a different location--

--so that its spot could be taken by Sauropods!!!

The T-Rexes and Triceratops are still there, thank goodness:

But now there are whole new sections with new fossils--

--new activities--

--and a beautiful tribute to a museum paleontologist we knew and loved:

So that's what I'd been most excited to revisit. Will, though, has a different favorite thing in the museum, and she was ecstatic to reunite with it:

She's not leaving for college until January, so hopefully they'll have some more quality time together before she goes. 

On a different evening, Will and I headed back to the museum after hours for their volunteer appreciation party. We had to leave Syd behind, because she's a very busy teenager with a part-time job these days, but as a bonus, we got to bring Matt with us!

And the party was 70s-themed, so I sewed us all bell bottoms:

The party was 70s-themed because of the museum's new Scooby-Doo exhibit, so along with our feasting--

--and festivities--

That's us very much NOT winning the pub quiz.

--we got to explore the new exhibit:

The interactive bits are always cute to explore, even if they're designed for small kids. The setup is basically that of an escape room designed for young children, and I think that sounds like just about the funnest thing ever:

My favorite part, though, was the collection of artifacts and original prints, most of which are on loan from Warner Bros.:

This is the original drawing for the original cartoon!

And then a special treat--another visit to Dinosphere, even better without the crowds!

It was fun to have Matt there, because instead of leaving him alone to explore, we could pester him and march him over to all our best places and tell him super interesting stories like "over here is where we ran a fossil activity one time seven years ago but the table next to us where kids could excavate chocolate chips out of cookies was better."

This is my favorite fossil in the new gallery:

It's a MOSASAUR!!!!!!!

Will remains partial to the Sauropods:

I really like that this is one of the magical places of my children's childhood that we haven't had to give up as they've grown. We no longer visit the local playgrounds every day, nor do we make a point to visit a hands-on museum everywhere we travel. The last time that we went into the library playroom, I didn't notice that it was the last time. It's lost to me just like the last time I nursed each child, or carried her on my hip. 

But this museum has kept a place for us even as the kids have aged, welcoming them as young visitors, then as young volunteers, and now as nearly-grown volunteers. But at the same time as Syd's volunteer ID has become nearly unrecognizable as her, since she's gotten so big since she sat for its photo, this museum has kept the magic of its galleries, always offering something splendid and fascinating to the kids even as they've grown and their interests have changed. I hope that this museum, the wonder of exploration, the thrill of trying something new, the beauty of coming back to the familiar, is a type of magic that they never have to grow out of.