IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Our school is celebrating Back to Football Friday this Friday, September 9th as a part of the NFL Play 60 program. Throughout our day we will have the theme of football integrated into our lessons.  As a part of this event, our school will be entered into a $10,000 grant from the NFL Play 60.  To add to our exciting day, the children are asked to wear their COLTS or other NFL gear on Friday.  We would love to show our spirit to win this grant for our school!

Here's a picture of the notes that we took on what our puppet show should be.

Today, I asked a question to see if the children were interested in putting on a puppet show for you all.  The majority of the children said they would love to so then I asked what show would we put on, and the children gave a list of ideas ranging from Goldilocks and the Three Bears to The Three Little Pigs to Michael Jordan to Spongebob.  We went through each choice and talked about how many characters were in the story so that we could narrow down the choices, and the children ended up with the following stories:

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

The Princess and the Frog

The Three Little Pigs

The Runaway Pancake

Those will be the stories we will be acting out.  Now, I am not sure when this will be because we have lost to do to prepare like:  creating the puppets, creating a backdrop, writing a script and program as well as making a poster.  But I did want to keep you up to date with where we were on the process of puppet making!!

By the way, next Wednesday at 11:15, a puppeteer from Peewinkle’s Puppet Theater will be here to help make puppets with the kids.  If you would like to come and help the children make the puppets that would be wonderful!

Our study of bugs has continued to progress over the past week. Word got out that we were studying bugs, so other teachers in our school started bringing insects to room 105! Mrs. Grojon brought a praying mantis to us last week. We studied it, drew observational drawings of it, and even named it…Cinderella Lightning McQueen! This weekend I went out a purchased a new terrarium and some crickets for our praying mantis. Cinderella is now a permanent fixture in our classroom community. We will continue to study this creature as a piece of our insect project!

Larry works on his observational drawing as well.

La'Mount and Aaliyah working on their observational drawing of our praying mantis.

Cinderalla Lightning McQueen

We have a time each day for Reader’s Workshop. During this time, I read a story and present a mini lesson that has to with with a concept or technique associated with reading. It may be on making predictions, decoding (sounding out words), or a variety of other reading skills. One of our big focuses this week is looking at letters when we are reading to see what the author is trying to say.  One of the skills I teach the kids is Tucker Signing. While this is not the only way that we present phonics at the lab school, it is one great tool to help develop letter-sound association in both reading and writing. The concept of Tucker Signing is that each letter has a sound and movement to go with it. By teaching letters in this way, chldren are given three ways to remember the letter- visual (by looking at it), auditory (by hearing and creating the sound), and kinesthetically (by making a movement  that is associated with the letter and sound). Tucker Signing is not only useful for individual letters, but also for digraphs (a pair of letters that creates one sound) which is something many of our more advanced readers are working on.  Ask your child If they can show you the “sign” and sound for some of their letters. You may be suprised at what you learn!

The following is a link to the Tucker Signs website should you want to find out a little more information about this strategy.

http://www.tuckersigns.com/parents.html

We are learning about a new material in our classroom this week.  Each day this week a group of students will have a chance to work with clay!  Here are a few pictures from our group today.