IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

As we continue to develop our classroom community, I am finding that it is important for our students to be united in their work. Some of our greatest moments as a class have come in times when every student is working together for a greater cause of helping someone else.

That being said, this Friday, I decided to challenge our class to come up with a way to care for Mrs. Clark. Mrs. Clark wasn’t feeling well on Friday due to a headache. I told our friends about this and asked them if they could come up with something we could create for her that would make her feel better. After moving past the initial ideas of cards, some of our friends thought it would be a good idea to make Mrs. Clark a pillow. They thought that if she could rest her head, it might help her headache go away. I thought this was GREAT idea and quickly sought out the help of our studio teacher, Mrs. Grotjan.

Together the students worked to pick their materials…

A group of students work with Mrs. Grotjan to pick appropriate fabric for our pillow.

make their measurements…

Students decide that they can find the measurements for our new pillow by measuring a pillow already in the room.

cut their fabric…

Leah and Heleria cut the fabric for our pillow.

fill the pillow and test its softness…

After filling the pillow with beans, our friends test it out to see if it's soft enough.

write cards…

Larry and Nailah write cards for Mrs. Clark.

Madison and Martavious write the names of everyone who worked on this project.

and collaborate on a presentation! It was a beautiful sight to see all of our friends working together to help someone they cared about!  I think it lead us one step closer to developing a culture and community of care.

 

 

 

 

Cameron reads his note from Eric Carle.

This week, we have been enjoying the various books by the beloved author Eric Carle. The kids have enjoyed identifying Mr. Carle’s distinguishing characteristics, including writing “repeaters”, using 5+ detail (ask your child what that means 🙂 ), writing about animals, being quite silly, and many others. We have been practicing making text to text connections during Reader’s Workshop and seeing if we can find any similarities in our books to the Eric Carle books. Today, one of our friends, Cameron, got an interesting note in his lunchbox that provoked some conversation. It read, “Dear Cameron, Thanks for reading my books. Love, Eric Carle” . Many of the kids were interested in this note and a question came up debating the validity of the note and whether Eric Carle was in fact a real person. Who was this guy anyways and how could he have gotten this note into our friend’s lunchbox? We started an investigation on Eric Carle and pulled him up on his website, EricCarle.com. We looked at his picture and read his biography, talking about how old he is and how he went to art school growing up. We will continue to talk about Eric Carle as an author and perhaps make comparissons to ourselves as authors too. Could we be famous authors one day?

Friends enjoy Eric Carle books during Read, Rest, Write.

Hello hello!  So, today we spoke as a group about where to go next with our project.  Some of the responses were as followed:

“It needs to be bigger (the stage).”-Heaven

“The stage needs to be wider.” -Jonah

“I have a big roll of paper and we can draw it for the background.” -Oliver

“Taller because parents won’t be able to see it well.” -Selam

Overall, the conversation was leading towards us needing to build a stage so that is where we are going!  This afternoon we did observation drawings of the current stage we have now in our room, and then we turned it over and drew a picture of kind of stage we want.  It was very interesting to see what the children desire for their stages.

Anyone out there good with building and with tools?  We might be asking you to help us build the stage sometime soon!

Have a great weekend!

Joseph's drawing of our current puppet stage.

Some friends doing their observational drawings of the puppet stage we currently have in our room.

Today to mix it up we decided to read our reader’s workshop books outside! The children loved being able to go outside to our courtyard and read their books, and as we walked in I had some friends ask if we could do it again tomorrow! We will see how the weather is…:)

David's observational drawing of a train!

We are at the very beginning of our train project.  This week we have been drawing trains and having lots of conversations about them!  As we begin to form our questions, we will find where our learning is going to take us.  Please keep tuned into see where we go!