12/12/12 - A Day of Dozens

Today we celebrated 12/12/12! It was a last minute thing as I only realized what today's date would be  last night as I was writing it on the board so... quick change of plans and I designed a Day of Dozens for the year group :)

We started with the 12 x table - the children wrote it out on Christmas lights, attached the lights to construction paper strips and glittered them heavily.

Then we did some mad minutes - write 12 things from 12 different categories as fast as you can. Some ideas were: 12 different candies, 12 colors, 12 countries, 12 months, 12 girls in our year group etc.
Next we gave pairs of children 36 mini marshmallows and 12 toothpicks and told them to construct a dozen snowmen...

( 1 pair started off gaily putting 5 marshmallows on every toothpick and then had a little problem to solve at the end :) ) but most of them managed to construct 12 snowmen made of 3 marshmallows each.

Naturally they ate the snowmen!

Following the sugar dose we played a team game - Draw 12 in 12!
Each team got a title - Twelve Terrific Tortoises Tasting Tangerines was one! - and they then had 12 minutes to draw a poster to illustrate their title.

The start of the race

One of the finished products :) Not bad for 12 minutes!

At 12:00 we took them all outside and arranged them in a giant 12 on the field and then did a count down to 12:12 on 12/12/12. They drew a clock to remember what they were doing at this historic time!

 

                                              

We ended the day with a fun pack of lots of different activities - math, literacy and just plain fun - all involving 12s. I particularly liked watching them try to fill a dozen eggs with 12 different animals that lay eggs! Apparently bats lay eggs! I'll bet you didn't know that! 

It'll be a hundred years before this day rolls around again so I'm glad we celebrated!