IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Investigating the growing collection.

Friends looking at our interesting materials.

We had a busy day today! Children came in this morning very excited to share their collected materials from over the weekend. We had a time during the day where each child who brought in materials could share one of their favorite objects and then put the rest of their interesting materials in the middle of our circle. The kids are excited to spend more time with the materials tomorrow and investigate different uses for them.

Our question of the day started many discussions about planes.

Our class has also continued to talk about airplanes and our growing interest for them. Our daily question, Have you ever been on an airplane? began a lot of discussion about planes and who had flown before and who desired to. Our class library has a new section all about airplanes and the kids are continuing to play with airplanes and create them during our explore time. I noticed many of our friends are creating airplanes in many different forms, including in books, paintings, and drawings.

Regan paints an airplane.

Aidan, Da'Sean, and David making their planes fly!

Today we played the Train Game in Math Workshop.  This is an easy game that you can play at home!  All you need is a dice, and 20 items (for 2 players).  Each player, in our classroom, got 10 unifix cubes and their goal was to connect their train.  Once you have made an entire train the game is over and you can play again!  Here are a few pictures of our friends playing the train game in class.

So on Friday we wrote a letter to Mr. Kidd (the head custodian) thanking him for fixing our outlet.  They loved writing the letter, and then we put it in our mailbox today.

Today, during Free Choice, some friends decided to write letters to their families, and we are actually going to mail them!  How many days will it take to get the mail to each person’s house?

I am excited to see where this idea of mail and sending mail goes!!

Some friends making their letters to send home!

Yesterday we had an exciting afternoon.  Our whole class went together to experience the studio for the first time.  While we do have a mini studio in our room, the main studio has so much more to explore!  There are light tabels, a stages, large amounts of blocks, and way more art materials!  The kids were so engaged!  Here are a few pictures from the experience. 

Good evening!

Today, we played an extension of a game we learned on Tuesday.  We partnered up with a friend, and each friend got a stick of unifix cubes (10 pieces in each stick).  Then the children had to take turns rolling a dice that had 1, 2, or 3 on it.  When they got a red number they had to add unifix cubes to complete the set of unifix cubes.  When they got a green number they could take it away.  The first person to get rid of their unifix cubes won!  I was partnered with Saa, and we were laughing because we could not get rid of our unifix cubes…we kept getting the red numbers.  When we discussed with the whole group what happened while we were playing, a lot of the other partners had the same issue so we are going to try to play tomorrow and see if our luck changes!  🙂

Here is a photo of a story book that Madeline P. made during Free Choice today.  It is about Cars 2, and she has four chapters to it.  She was so proud of the words she added and the creative manner she made her story book!