Friday's dreary weather didn't hold back smiles for the students at John W. Decas Elementary School, as they celebrated World Smile Day in conjunction with preparing for a math lesson.

The students' math lesson involved a counting line, where a continuous band of foot-long, rectangular segments of paper were taped on the wall adjacent to one another, and ran along the school’s main hallway. Each classroom, one by one, filed out into the hallway, and each student had the chance to stick a smiley face sticker on the paper segments. Only ten smiley stickers were allowed for each segment. With an enrollment of 650 students the Decas School, some quick math told the students that the total number of paper segments they’d use would equal 65.

Principal Donna Noonan said the activity was designed to get the students to start visualizing numbers in blocks of ten.

“We'll reconfigure them, but we'll leave them in the hallway for a couple of days so they can get a sense of the value of 650," Noonan said. "Then, we can break it apart and put it back together in different kinds of configurations so they can see a one hundred block, or a five hundred block.”

Darlene McQuade, the kindergarten teacher at Decas, sat her classroom down in the hallway and asked her kids if they knew the activity's purpose.

“We want make counting easier,” answered one of the kindergarteners who was able to understand the concept.

Principal Noonan's Friday morning intercom announcement informed the students about the background of World Smile Day, which always takes place on the first Friday of the month of October. The day was initiated by the late Harvey Ball, a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts, who created the iconic smiley face in 1963. The face quickly became a popular international symbol of goodwill, and visible on numerous merchandise items during the 1960s and 1970s.

Ball initiated the first World Smile Day in 1999, and it has been celebrated each year since. Following Ball's death in 2001, the Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation was created. It is a non-profit, charitable trust that supports children's causes, and uses the slogan "Improving this world, one smile at a time."

For more information about World Smile Day or The Harvey Ball World Smile Foundation visit: worldsmile.org.