First graders officially became 100 days brighter at Wareham Elementary School on Tuesday, Feb. 6.

One by one, the students marched through the halls wearing brown paper bag vests adorning 100 items each in celebration of the 100th day of school.

An array of stickers, gold coins, Legos, photographs and more were used by students in groups of 10 that were then attached to the brown paper grocery bags.

“I painted it purple because we went to the store because we saw the purple and my sister agreed,” Genasis Gumbs said, adding how she then used stars as some of her counting items.

Nikolas Statkus said, “Me and my dad went to Dollar Tree to get these and I got some carrots and eyeballs and star stickers.”

Ariella Hewson said she used hearts and stickers for her vest, but the hearts were her favorite.

Oakley Morton said marching through the halls in front of everyone, it was “very loud.”

Ariella said it was “scary,” adding how she is afraid of heights. “We were super high and I felt I was going to fall down with an untied shoe.”

In addition to the march, students did a variety of activities to learn more about mathematical concepts associated with the number 100.

Ariella and Oakley highlighted how they got to go to different classrooms for some of the activities. 

Their teacher, Kathy Harunk, said some of those tasks included exercising, licking lollipops, flipping pennies, stacking cups and dancing for a certain amount of time.

“The first graders have been doing this a long time,” Harunk said. “What it is is basically we’ve been counting by 10s and fives and skip counting throughout the whole year so far up to the 100th day.”

She added, “We’ve been doing a lot of groups by ten basically looking into multiplication without them being aware that’s what it is.”

The first graders are the only ones in the school to do the march. 

“It’s like a right of passage,” Harunk said, adding how the second graders will celebrate 100 days by dressing up as though they were a hundred years old. 

Several students had art pieces hung on the walls in the hallways with pictures depicting how they imagine they’d look at the age of 100 in addition to five bucket list items they’d like to cross off before reaching that age. 

Among the listed activities, students specified whether they wanted to be married by then, whether they wanted children and how many, what pets they’d like and, of course, some must-see destinations, including Disney World, Florida, Jamaica, under the sea and Ohio.

“It’s an elementary school,” Harunk said. “You have to give us credit for a few of the funny things that we do.”