IPS/Butler University Laboratory School

Michael drives his car on 465.

One of our new materials in class is cars. We have a tub with various sizes and types of cars that the kids love making ramps for and building streets for. Today, I noticed several friends running their cars over maps we have set up in the classroom. Aidan was tracing a thick red line on our Indianapolis map on our wall. “Its driving!” Aidan and I talked about how the thick red line made a box around Indianapolis. I explained that its a very busy highway- the 465 Interstate! Michael came over and began tracing his car along 465 as well. I am really excited to see where this global, map, geography investigation takes our class.

Tags: capable, curious, inspiration

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and vacation!

Today we were back to school and in full swing! We did have some sad news though today. I’m sorry to say that over Thanksgiving Break, our beloved praying mantis, Cinderella Lightning McQueen, passed away. I shared this news with the students at the end of the day. They were sad but had some beautiful ideas of how to celebrate Cinderalla. We will be having a funeral and burial ceremony tomorrow in honor of our class pet. I will keep you updated as to how this plays into the culmination of our bug project!

Welcome back!!  We are very excited to be back to school after a week long break.  I just wanted to remind everyone that this THURSDAY, DECEMBER 1st we will be having our Family Math Night from 6:00-7:00 at school.  Come and learn a few of the games the kids have been playing over the past weeks at school.  Each family will leave with a math packet full of games to play together at home.

Today was such a productive day!  The kids noticed that we had a new agenda on our board today so they were excited to see that (nothing changed except we added yoga, daily news, and spelling work to it).  🙂

We started spelling work today.  During this time, the children are reading their library books.  As they are reading their books, I am calling a group over at a time (3-5 children) to work on 5 spelling words.  It is a short process-5 minutes tops.  Each day we will work on the same five spelling words, but we will look at/work on different things with those words.  Then on Friday, we will add them to our individual word wall book as well as the word wall.  The children were SO enthusiastic about this-some even saying, “I love spelling!  I do not want to stop!”

The five words this week are:  “and”, “the”, “we”, “my”, and “me”.  Feel free to work on these at home.

Today many of the children were asking if we were going to have another pajama party.  I told them that we needed or could earn another party by continuing to make those great choices we have been making.  So, after some discussion about how many points we needed to earn (some said twenty even though that was lower than our original 25 point goal) we came up that we needed to earn 35 points.

Then we discussed what we are going to do for our party.  There were ideas like a disco party, a party where we dress up like famous people, a game party, a cake and ice cream party, and a fancy dress party.  The votes were tabulated and it was between the fancy dress party and game party.  The fancy dress party won!  Now, some of our friends were not so happy of this final vote, but we talked about how at least everyone got a vote and maybe next time their vote will win the party (I have not told them yet, but there will be some games at this fancy dress party so I think the friends that were not happy will be excited about that).

One other exciting part of our day was when I introduced the Doubles Rap (you can search Doubles Rap (I Can Add Doubles) on You Tube to see it).  We have been talking about doubles (1+1, 2+2, etc.) in Math Workshop so finding this rap was just perfect timing!  The children caught on so quickly to the song that by end of the day they were singing all of the words!  I was impressed, and they said, “Can we listen to it again?”

Hope you all had a nice break and welcome back!

Lucas and Ruth explore with magnets.

Good evening families! I was certainly happy to be back at school and I think the kids missed being here too! We had an awesome day today. Our friends were excited to discover many new materials in the classroom, including magnets, many more maps, books about places around the world, and cars! We continued our discussion on where our big airplane trip should be and even watched a couple short videos about potential places- Mexico, Antarctica, and China! The kids really enjoyed our new continent song “North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Antarctica and don’t forget Australia!” Ask your child to sing it to you!

We are enjoying learning about the world around us!